Lucifer could hear the highway traffic in the distance, softly thrumming like an approaching swarm of insects. She took one of the shovels from David and said, “I don’t like advertising what I’m doing, even if there is no one around to see. And it’s always a good idea to keep quiet when sneaking around cemeteries at night. Besides, we’re about to do something very offensive. Let’s not be obnoxious about it, okay?”
David squared his shoulders and nodded. “You’re right. I apologize. It’s just that this reminds me of sneaking out to tee-pee people’s houses.”
“Tee-pee? What’s that?”
“Toilet paper. You throw rolls of toilet paper over the house, into the trees, that kind of thing. It’s a pain to clean up.”
Lucifer studied his face for a moment. “That is simply the stupidest thing I’ve—”
“Ever heard. Yeah, I know,” David said rather bashfully. “Definitely seems even more so now. Please don’t judge me.”
“Why in the world would you ever . . . you know, never mind. Just try and keep it down to a mild roar. This way.” She wanted to be annoyed with him, but she was too busy being annoyed with herself for letting him come along. This wasn’t something civilians should be doing and she knew it, even if it was his girlfriend that was missing. But here he was, following along like a tall, handsome puppy eager to play. And as much as she didn’t want to, she had to admit that she liked that. Which annoyed her most of all.
When Lucifer stopped to examine a gravestone at the edge of the cemetery, David said, “What was the woman’s name again?”
“Helen Peltier.”
“Do you want me to start looking at the other end of the cemetery and then we meet in the middle?”
Lucifer moved to the next grave, feeling the cold stone with her fingertips. “No. Cemeteries like this have a basic design to them. The oldest graves tend to be in the center while the newest are out at the edges.”
“When did Helen die?”
“1957. And it’s Ms. Peltier.”
“Okay. Does it really matter if I call her Helen?” David asked.
“It does to me.” Lucifer stood and pointed toward a cluster of several towering stones farther into the cemetery. “I’d say she’s several rows in that direction. C’mon.”
Lucifer led the way through the rows of graves. The grass was tall and brittle, but the earth beneath was soft and spongy. Dew-covered spiderwebs hung between a few of the gravestones, the tiny drops of moisture occasionally glinting in the fading moonlight. “Lucifer,” David said. “How many times have you done this?”
She stopped to examine a short stone carved into a Celtic cross, but the name and dates were too weathered to read. “Too many. It’s pretty common for people to be buried with artifacts. It’s actually the safest place for them. But every once in a while, someone will go looking for them and I have to beat them to the punch.”
When they reached the cluster of large gravestones, Lucifer felt the ground grow firm and the grass more pliable. Lucifer handed her shovel to David and set to examining the nearest of the stones. There were five of them, nearly identical. Each was a rectangular slab of black granite that tapered into a pyramid at the top with smooth and unbroken lines. And while the other markers in the cemetery littered the ground like long-forgotten toys, these five stood perfectly upright.
She reached for the nearest marker and ran her fingers over the name. Donald Peltier, 1884–1948. The next gravestone was for Mary Peltier and the next for Elizabeth Peltier. Each of the five gravestones belonged to someone with the last name Peltier. But none of the gravestones belonged to Helen Peltier.
“I found her,” David said.
Lucifer saw David standing over a tiny and sad rectangular plaque overgrown with weeds just beyond the firm grass beneath the Peltier gravestones. David squatted down and read. “Helen Peltier, born 1895, died 1957.” He stood and casually leaned on the shovels. “Guess her family didn’t like her that much.”
Lucifer scanned the tall, perfect monuments, taking in the dates of the deceased. Then she smiled. “No, I think they loved her very much. At least she loved them. They all died before she did, so there was probably no one left to bury her. With no family left, they just put her in her family plot with a simple marker and called it a day.”
Since Helen’s name was on the book, it was a safe bet to assume that she had some knowledge of the arcane. That explained why the Peltier family plot didn’t seem to deteriorate as much as the surrounding graves. Ms. Peltier worked some magic to keep her family’s eternal resting place respectable. She loved them. And knowing that made this even harder for Lucifer.
“So what now?” David asked.
“We dig.”
Lucifer took a shovel from David and slammed it into the earth. After the third shovel-full, David said, “Lucifer, I’m not comfortable with this.”
She stopped. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that, David. I’m not comfortable with this either. But if I want to find Gina, this is what I have to do. If you want to wait in the car, I understand.”
He stood quietly, staring at Ms. Peltier’s little marker. “I’ll do anything to find Gina. Even this. I just thought she’d be buried in a tomb or something. I didn’t think we’d have to actually dig her up. Can’t you cast a spell or something to just make her pop out of the ground?”
“No. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Exhuming corpses shouldn’t be an easy thing to do,” she said as she went back to digging. Soon, David joined her, and they spent the next hour in silence.
As much as she hated to admit it to herself, Lucifer was glad that David was with her. And not just because he made the digging go so much more quickly. She liked looking up and seeing him there, the way his shoulders flexed beneath his sweatshirt when he tossed dirt out of the hole, his solid silhouette towering over her. She moved in a world that was too often ugly and terrifying. It was nice to have something beautiful around.
Thunk!
Lucifer’s shovel hit something solid. “Here, take this,” she said as she handed her shovel to David. The smell of soil and decay was thick in the air. When she knelt down, the damp soil soaked into the knees of her jeans and sent a chill up her spine. She cupped her hands and began pulling at the dirt. Roots, rocks, and a few squirmy things thankfully unseen in the darkness came away by the scoopful until a small area was cleared and Lucifer could see the dull shine of Helen Peltier’s coffin.
Lucifer grabbed a small flashlight from her trick bag and handed it to David. She pointed, saying, “Shine the light on the ground there.” She knelt back down and carefully scooped more dirt.
“I’ve never seen a dead body before,” David said.
“And you’re not going to see this one. Once I have the viewing door uncovered, I want you to crawl out and wait for me.” David opened his mouth to protest, but Lucifer interrupted him. “Please, David.”
David sighed and clicked on the flashlight. “All right, Lucifer.”
The remaining dirt was dense and came away in chunks. The more she scooped away, the more she could tell the coffin had been deformed by the pressure of the earth on top of it. Once she had it completely exposed, she would need the shovel to pry it open.
“Stop looking at me,” she said.
“What?”
Lucifer moved another scoopful of dirt. “You keep shining the light in my face and not the ground. You were looking at me.”
“Sorry.” He moved the light back to the coffin. “Lucifer, what kind of artifact do you think Ms. Peltier has?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
“Then what exactly does she have?”
“An answer.”
After another minute, Lucifer had the top of the coffin completely uncovered. She took the flashlight from David. “Thanks. Now up you go. This will only take a minute.” Once David was out of the hole, Lucifer took a shovel and pressed the tip of the blade into the crease of the coffin’s head door. She put all her weight
on the shovel handle and held it there until the lid slowly opened with a cacophonous creak. She was instantly hit with the familiar smell of mold and long-rotted flesh. With a final push, Lucifer opened the lid the rest of the way and looked at the woman buried inside.
Helen Peltier had been buried over fifty years ago and was now only skin and bones. Her hair rested around her head like a nest of wires, and her faded yellow dress was so brittle that it crumbled at the slightest touch. It was impossible to tell from the state of decay, but Lucifer judged from the structure of her skull that she was beautiful in life.
“How’s it going down there?” David asked, but Lucifer ignored him. She put the flashlight between her teeth and reached into her trick bag. She pulled out a silver hand mirror. The handle was made of pearl that had started to fade to a dull yellow hue while the silver around the glass of the mirror was stained with age.
Lucifer inhaled deeply then held the mirror up to her mouth, breathing on it to get it as foggy as possible. Very carefully, she placed the foggy mirror over Helen Peltier’s face. “Where is Gina Pierce?” she asked. She didn’t see anything happen, but she could feel the mirror gently vibrate in her hand. The vibration lasted only a few seconds, but it was long enough for Lucifer to know that she got her answer.
“Thank you,” she said. “Sorry to have disturbed you.” After she closed the casket lid, Lucifer held the mirror up to the flashlight. When she saw the mirror, her heart went cold. There, written on the foggy glass was only a single word:
Witchdown.
“Lucifer? Lucifer, are you okay down there? You’ve been awfully quiet for a while.”
It took her a moment to find her voice. When she did, she said, “Let’s fill it up,” and crawled out of the hole.
They shoveled in near silence. David tried prodding her with questions, but Lucifer didn’t speak. She couldn’t. The horror of it all squeezed her chest, making it hard to breathe.
When the hole was almost refilled, Lucifer said, “Do you have any paper in your car? Napkins, anything?”
“Are you going to tell me what happened down there?”
“David!”
“Jeez, yes! Okay?”
“Sorry. Could you . . .”
“Yeah. I’ll be right back.” He threw more than dropped his shovel and slinked off into the darkness.
By the time he came back, Lucifer had the hole filled and was tamping the dirt down with her feet. David handed her a bundle of napkins left over from some burger dinner he had left in his car. She took one and started rolling it into a loose tube. In just a couple of minutes, she had made a respectable origami rose and placed it on Ms. Peltier’s marker.
“We can go now.” Lucifer turned and walked toward the car.
She got into the passenger’s seat and waited for David to put the shovels in the trunk. When he slid in behind the steering wheel, he put the keys into the ignition but stopped. The two of them sat in the dark, the muffled sound of their breathing roaring in the silence.
“You’re scaring me, Lucifer. Please, tell me. You said you were looking for an answer. Did you find it?”
“. . . Yes.”
“And?”
Lucifer hugged herself to fight the chill that would not seem to leave her. She looked up at David, at his perfect mouth and worried eyes. “I’m so sorry, David,” she said. “But you’re never going to see Gina again.”
CHAPTER 12
“Explain.”
“I don’t know if I can, David.” Lucifer wrapped her hands around the tiny cup of tea and took a sip. The tea was bitter, but its warmth fought against the chill that had taken residence inside her. When she saw the black crescents of grave dirt caked under her fingernails, Lucifer quickly hid her hands under the table. “It’s complicated.”
“Try.”
Before Lucifer could begin, a waitress in an apron stained with grease, eggs, and chronic disappointment glided up to their booth. “Cheeseburger and fries?” David gave the waitress a small, apathetic nod, and she set the plate down in front of him. “Anything else for you?” she asked Lucifer.
“No, just the tea is fine. Thank you.”
Outside, semitrucks wandered through the parking lot, their tires hissing through the drizzle of rain that started just after Lucifer and David had left the cemetery. Slow, aimless rivulets of water slid down the windows.
“We went to the cemetery for an answer,” David said. “What was it? Where Gina is?”
Lucifer nodded as she folded a corner of her napkin and used it to dig under her nails. It helped some, but dirt still filled the lines and creases of her hands like tiny cracks in a winter pond, revealing the dark water swirling underneath the snow-covered ice.
Lucifer looked up. David’s normally calm and focused eyes wandered erratically across her face as if he could will the truth from her features. “So you know where she is.”
“Yes.” Her voice was barely audible over the grumbling conversations of truckers squatting at the counter. She cupped her hands and blew a short blast of hot breath into them, hoping it would bring a bit more feeling back to her digits. But just thinking about where Gina was made all the heat in Lucifer’s body drain away.
“And?”
“She’s in Witchdown, David. Gina is in a place called Witchdown.”
David stood and pulled a wad of cash from his pocket. He tossed the money next to his untouched food and said, “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“This Witchdown place. C’mon.”
“Your Romeo plan is very noble. Truly it is, but it’s not that simple.”
“No, Lucifer, it really is that simple. We get in the car and we go. Or am I going by myself?”
“Where, exactly?” Lucifer asked. “Just where are you going to go, David? You think you can punch ‘Witchdown’ into your GPS and drive there?”
“I don’t know, but it’s better than sitting here and doing nothing!”
Two men in canvas jackets and dirty ball caps gave David a hard stare. Lucifer flashed them a quick smile, and the two men nodded before returning their focus back on their biscuits and gravy. “David,” she said. “I know you’re worried about Gina, but right now all you’re doing is attracting attention. Attention we don’t need considering we just committed a felony. So please, sit back down.”
David balled his hands into fists. After a moment, he slid back behind the booth. “Okay, so Gina is in a place called Witchdown. What is it? Some kind of hippie commune?”
“I promise you, it’s not.”
David leaned forward, the steam from his food curling up and around his face. “Then what is it? Why can’t we just go there? I know, you said it’s complicated. So simplify it for me. I’m new to this whole magic thing.”
“Simplify. All right.” Lucifer took another sip of her tea. “Seven Sisters, all of them witches, came here to the New World three, four hundred years ago to escape a very specialized group of German Inquisitors who were hunting them. The Sisters formed a small village that became known as Witchdown. But the Inquisitors found them and tried to kill them. The only way the witches could survive was to pull their entire village into another dimension called the Shade. A dimension only the dead can travel.” Lucifer sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “That’s about as simple as I can make it.”
Outside, a pickup truck trundled through the parking lot, the hiss of rainwater under its tires dulled by the thin windows of the diner. David sat in silence, unmoving. Two days ago, he had no idea magic was real. Now he was hearing about witches and inquisitors and dimensions. Lucifer knew it was a lot to process.
“How did you learn about these things?” The way he asked the question did little to hide his skepticism.
“Stealing things.”
“Oh yeah. Because you’re a thief.”
Lucifer scratched the imperceptible outline of the mark on her shoulder. Among other things.
“So it was one of these witches that took Gina
,” David said. “One of the Seven Sisters.”
“It looks that way, yeah.”
“Well, that’s not that bad, is it? I know a couple of witches. Wiccans. They seem pretty harmless.”
“David, we’re not talking about Gaia-worshipping, peace, love, and good happiness stuff here. Your friends can call themselves whatever they want, but they aren’t real witches. The Seven Sisters are. They’re witches with a capital ‘W.’”
“What’s the difference?”
“You have to do some pretty horrific things to become a real witch.”
“Like what?” he asked. “Skin a black cat?”
“If only.” Lucifer didn’t want to scare him further, but she didn’t want to lie to him either. He needed to understand exactly what they were dealing with. “The final ritual to becoming a witch is the worst. It’s . . . unthinkable. To truly become a witch, you have to make a sacrifice. A sacrifice ‘born of one’s own flesh.’”
“Born of one’s own flesh?”
“Their own child. It’s why only women can be witches. And also, thankfully, why so few women are.” It was also the reason Lucifer absolutely hated it when people accused her of being one.
“Who could do such a thing?” David asked.
“Very dangerous people.”
“And you’re sure there’s no way to get to this Witchdown. No way at all?”
Lucifer shook her head. “David, the Shade is a place of death. Life isn’t tolerated there. The creatures there hate the living, and I mean hate. It could be jealousy, fear, resentment, I don’t really know. All I do know is that only the dead can get there.”
All the blood drained from David’s face. “So Gina’s dead,” he said, his voice shallow and small. His defeated expression hit Lucifer like a knife plunged in her chest. But it wasn’t seeing the gravity of David’s pain and loss at losing Gina that broke her heart: it was jealousy.
Lucifer pushed the uncomfortable realization to the back of her mind. She reached across the table and grabbed his hand. Its warmth seeped into her cold, stiff fingers, feeling better than even the cup of hot tea. “No, she’s not,” she said. “A Sister of Witchdown wouldn’t go through all the trouble of reaching into our world and kidnapping her just to kill her. Gina has much more value alive.”
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