by Russell Moon
I snag the son of a bitch by the neck, out of the air, just as he is passing through.
I grab him and I hold him and I stare at him, and I have such rage for Chuck and my mother that I cannot feel triumph at the growing power of mine that has enabled me to snare him. I cannot think of enough ways to hurt this creature, hurt him all the way back to his owner and his followers.
The hateful fink of a bird is raking me with sharp, mighty claws and trying to bite me to ribbons, but I feel nothing but satisfaction. I squeeze and squeeze his neck.
Then I take him in both hands. I take his rotten head in my right and his neck in my left, and I pull and I twist.
I jerk him, hear the crack, feel the body go slack.
I hear it loud now, on this beautiful Irish breeze.
I hear screams of rage, way over yonder, and the sound fills my stomach with butterflies.
I am going to show my dad.
“I already see,” he says from the doorway.
“It’s time to go, son. It’s time to go get your mother.”
CHAPTER 6
“There it is,” my father says as we stop on the crest of a luminous green hill overlooking several others.
“Where?” I ask, scanning. It doesn’t help that I’m not exactly sure what “it” is.
“There,” he says, without pointing or in any way indicating a spot. With a heavy sigh he resumes his march.
It still looks like nothing but open, rolling hillside, until we walk straight up the next modest hill, then come halfway down the other side. When we get there, my father stops, stops me, and turns me around by the shoulders. My stomach seems to do a few back flips when I finally see.
It looks almost like a face, a sleepy face, cut into the side of the hill. There are three holes leading straight into the earth, cut so subtly you could only see them from precisely this angle. They are slanted, framed by stacks of flat, slate stones and covered on top entirely by thick turf, grass, and moss. Leading me around the side, my father shows me another hole, placed like an ear on the side of the hill’s head.
There is a heavy, dense fog settling on us as we stand before the side entrance.
We say nothing, just look at each other and enter.
I follow him in and remain close at his heels. I have a sweeping, panicky feeling that this is all bigger than I am, that, no matter what I think I’ve learned, I am no match for what lies ahead. I try to take comfort in my father’s knowledge, his certainty. I would cling to him like a bat if I could, but I make do by placing a hand on his back and keeping it there.
We walk down and down and down, descending through layers of earth, through stone tunnels where visibility is all but impossible. Surprisingly, there are stairs at first, but then there is just dirt underfoot, then mud, and then stone steps again. The walls—I run my free hand along them constantly—feel like coal. I smell earth. And, strangely, smoke. The path turns to the left over and over again, then the right, then straight ahead.
My father apparently knows this place, and knows it well. But I am scared out of my senses.
“Where are they?” I whisper. “When will they…?”
He does not answer.
But I need no answer anyway, in a moment.
We emerge.
Into a wide-open area, full of low, diffuse light, and the smells—God, the unmistakable glorious smells—of the verdant forest. It is exactly, in fact…
“Where are we?” I demand.
What it looks like is Blackwater. Exactly like the stone circle at the center of the coven’s power at the center of the woods. In Blackwater.
“We couldn’t be,” I say, sort of nudging him to answer.
He will not be nudged. These are the questions, I realize, that I cannot have answered for me anymore. These are the things I must either learn to figure out, or just miss.
And anyway, what does it matter? How could it matter? What matters is that it doesn’t matter, and I must not be distracted by what might be called facts.
“Precisely,” he says, while still looking all around the place.
I look straight up, into what would be the sky. But there is no sky—no roof either, no ceiling, no cave. We are neither indoors nor outdoors. We are both. What I am looking at, I finally realize, when I see small, dark spots moving up there far, far away, is a mirror. Or at least a mirror image of us here on the ground. There are my father and me, small figures, moving across the green field in the stone circle.
I snap my head downward when I realize he has begun walking again, and with a sense of purpose. I hurry to catch up.
And I see what has drawn him.
At the far edge of the grand stone circle, about one hundred yards away, there is movement. In a thicket of trees, I make out horses—two white horses—facing in opposite directions.
I will doubt these trees, I will doubt these horses. But as we get ever closer, I see something I cannot doubt.
“Eleanor,” I scream and shoot past my father toward her.
I make it only two steps before he grabs me roughly from behind. I don’t even look back to question him—I just strain to get to her, to keep her figure—fuzzy and inanimate but definitely Eleanor—in my sight. And then, as my father walks us both slowly forward, I can see it all.
She is tied, hand and foot, to the horses. Her left hand and foot are bound to one white horse, her right to the other, so that anything that might cause the animals to get overexcited and gallop off would tear my mother in half. Her head is slumped on her chest—she’s unconscious, maybe. The horses seem to be the only things keeping her upright.
My doubt, my shield, comes right up again, but more out of need than mental strength.
“It’s not really her, right?” I say as we stop again, still thirty yards out. “It’s not really her. It’s a trap. It’s just to get us where they want us, right?”
“It is really her,” he says solemnly. “And it is a trap.”
We are so much in danger now, in this underground den, that the sound of an obair has risen from a buzzing to an indistinguishable din. But still, I sense a spike as my father speaks—some elevated danger—and snap my gaze to our right.
And there, twice as far from us as Eleanor is, is a group of them. Either we have missed them completely in our absorption, or they have just materialized. Either way, seeing them sends gooseflesh to every inch of skin I can feel anymore, blotting out for the moment the rage I should and would feel. There are many of them, of course, many more than I knew in Blackwater—too many to count.
They are gathered, sending not even a glance our way, in some quiet, intense, reflective ceremony, kneeling at the base of one of the biggest stones in the stone circle. The very type of thing, I think with a sad smile, that Eleanor would call “that witch bullshit.” Is it possible they don’t even know we’re here?
Whatever. Leave them to it, is what I say. I head straight for the unconscious Eleanor, daring them to come after, pulling out of my father’s grasp, pounding along at a pace halfway between march and trot. It would be a gallop if I weren’t worried about getting the horses to do the same.
I am nearly there, and my heart is about to explode in my chest. I throw a glance to the right and see that no one has moved. I can practically smell my mother’s skin: I am reaching out, ready to release her, nearly weeping….
When my father grabs me again.
“They did not go to such great lengths to let the three of us ride away,” he says. He points to the horses, each of them beginning to snort and paw the ground. “You can’t touch her, Marcus. You must know this. We have to deal with them first.”
He pulls me away, and I am dying inside as my mother gets farther and farther from me. I am so close, and I know he is right, but to be so close, after coming so far…
“The only way to her,” he says, his voice thick with actual feeling, “is through these ones here.” He points at the coven as we near them. None of them appears to have taken notice of us,
still. Even as we come within striking distance, and then as we are standing practically on top of them, they appear to be indifferent to our presence. Maybe they are in a group trance or something. Maybe we have caught them at the best possible time.
The only one facing us is Eartha. She has her back against the huge, altarlike stone, and she is pressed abnormally flat, as if she were etched into it or stuck there magnetically. Her eyes are cast down, as the bunch kneeling in front of her chant something indecipherable. There is no sign of Spence—no glimpse of his conspicuous silver hair anywhere in the crowd.
“They are addressing her as a princess. As a deity, almost,” my father says.
“What?” I snap.
He sounds academic. “That is what the words say. Her father has a ring now. They are planning on having two more very shortly. They already see her as royalty.”
Eartha’s eyes slowly turn up and meet mine, making me struggle not to flinch. She bows ever so slightly, smiling ever so slightly. I am amazed. She looks so extremely peaceful and beautiful.
And then, as if we have been at the back of a theater disturbing the show, Arj, at the head of the group, stands and turns on us. He looks like he is about to say something.
But I never hear it, because I am suddenly belted from the side. As I stumble, I see who it is that has knocked me over. Baron. Of course, Baron. He has been waiting forever for this, and now he leaps on top of me, pinning me to the ground.
My father’s hands are suddenly on me. He yanks me back up, out from under Baron, and pulls me around so that we are back-to-back, like gunfighters outnumbered. I get such strength from this, the physical contact, as we lean against each other. We are, through our connection, more than just two.
They are coming now—breaking up their ceremony, moving toward us in groups but not yet attacking. I spot a few familiar faces from Blackwater, but mostly they are swallowed in a sea of witches I have never seen. I can feel all of my father’s movements as he faces one and then another. But our enemies, for now, give him, us, a wide berth.
All but Baron. Baron takes a step closer to me. “You’re back,” he says, stating the obvious.
We stare at each other, waiting. My free hand is extended toward him, palm down, fingers straight out. Baron opts for brute force, lunging toward me again.
I don’t even think about it, but I don’t flinch—my fingers, all on their own, simply start twitching, flicking, as if there is something awful stuck to them and I need to get it off.
As I do this, Baron halts in his tracks, twitching. Little jerking motions, jukes and jives and clear pain reactions. They are small, like he is being stuck by hundreds of tiny knives, but they are getting to him, distracting him, making him swat at himself all over. This is why we are being given a wide berth.
Baron almost doesn’t notice when I step right up to him.
He looks at me. We have never been this close before. His skin is all pocked and burnt-looking. He has a deeply sour odor about him. He tries to grin at me, but it falls away quickly.
He raises a hand to try and zap me, move me, singe me, but it is a waste of one of his last moments on this earth.
I watch him expire. I watch as his life, past and future, passes before both of our eyes. I am stunned by what I am doing.
He withers, aging before my eyes into something old, shrunken—and keeps going, until he crumples like dust. He is lying there at my feet, a mere molehill of former life, and there is silence all around us.
And then they come. From all sides the battle rages into life as if a cue has been given. Instantly, there are coven bastard bodies flying at us from everywhere.
Too rushed to use the magic that just destroyed Baron, I start physically swinging out at them with this thing on the end of my arm, my fist that feels like Thor’s hammer. I am knocking heads in. I feel it like a depth charge, like something with explosives built into it, but I realize quickly that it is not creating the damage it should.
Desperate, I glance whenever I can—between knocking each attacker back—at my father behind me. As each witch or group of witches approaches, he does something like a perverse, inverted, high-speed version of the last rites on somebody, extending his gnarled hand like a stop sign in front of them, dropping them to their knees without even touching them. And then he reaches toward their lips with his fingertips, reaches, then snaps his wrist. They fold before him and do not get up.
I pull my punches now and imitate him. And then we are both dropping them. Bodies begin piling up around us, and in the confusion, I stumble over them again and again but keep working, knocking down one attacker after another. It is exhilarating.
I watch what I am doing as if my mind is detached from it. I throw one witch up and through the sky-roof with a mere flick of my hand. I hold another witch’s face in my other hand and clamp to it long enough to watch as it petrifies, turns to hardened clay, then to dust, in my grip.
It seems almost too easy now. They do not possess our power. They do not have the strength to stand and fight against my father and me. This is why they fear us. We are too much for them. Or at least, I believe so, for minutes.
But soon I am panting, tiring, and the stream of witches does not cease. It becomes clear that there are more here than were gathered around Eartha before, more than I can possibly imagine. For every witch we drop, another appears from nowhere, out of the shadows. The stream is endless. And Spence—the “head”—is nowhere to be seen. If we must get through them all to get to Eleanor, we will never get to Eleanor. I don’t even have time to look in her direction, to confirm that she is still there, somewhere behind us.
The witches keep coming. In wave after wave they throw themselves at us, to their deaths. And none of them seems to care. Life is cheap, apparently, on their side of the divide, while my father and I clearly cannot afford the loss of one of us.
And in fact I am feeling we cannot afford these deaths, no matter which side.
“It is the fabric of an obair connecting all of us,” my father says to me. “Death, murder, weakens us all. We are killing ourselves in small increments.”
I don’t want to do this anymore. I want my mother, and I want the coven finished, I want all the things I have been striving for, but my heart for the battle is being bled out of me. I must fight this. Must fight my weakness. Must fight myself.
Perhaps it is this weakness that they detect, because suddenly—amidst the nameless, faceless witches that have been engulfing me—I am rushed by one that I recognize, one with more power and maybe more worth. Arj.
We were almost friends once, it seemed. It felt. But now we are circling each other, wordless. I cannot seem to want to kill him.
“Lost your taste for the fight, have you?” he spits. “Fine by me. But I won’t be turned. I’m here to kill. I’m here to take that ring and that finger and that arm if I have to, and there will be no regrets on this side. That is what will make me a stronger prince than you would ever have been. When Eartha and I rule together…”
I reach for him, for his mouth to shut him up, but he slaps my hand.
Careful, Marcus, I hear my father say in my head. Focus. Don’t let him distract you from our purpose.
Weakly, I make a halfhearted attempt at attack. He grabs my wrist. He seizes my hand and promptly bites down on my ring finger with all the pressure of a bullterrier. I panic at having the ring in jeopardy. But at the same time, I know I am too strong for Arj. That I can stop this.
I have no choice but to hit him with my free hand so hard on the side of the face that he goes flying several feet.
It is mad, the speed with which he goes scudding across the ground, away from us. He is down, and now my father is battling with somebody behind me.
I turn to look, to help, and freeze. He is battling Arj.
I look back to where Arj landed a moment ago, and in his place, crawling toward me and clearly stunned, is Eartha. She is in a pool of her own flowing robe, her princess robe, her hippie r
obe like Jules wore.
I am frozen. Shocked rigid. Frozen with indecision, confusion, stupidity. The vision—of Jules, of her—is killing me.
I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. Arj or Eartha, it doesn’t matter. They are both dangerous.
I raise my fist, look down at her. I should destroy her.
But instead I turn away.
I turn to see Arj and my father locked in a mutual death grip. My father has his hand gripping Arj’s throat, and Arj has both hands grabbing my father’s face, his nails digging in, pulling the flesh from the bone.
I try to engage, to help, but I cannot. Whenever I lunge into the fray, Arj angles farther in the other direction, using my father as a shield between us even as he is trying to kill him.
My weakened father is trying to do to Arj the same thing he’s done to so many others, to pull something up out of him, his spirit. But Arj, unbelievably, is proving to be too powerful for him, or at least too cagey. He keeps my father at all the wrong angles and punishes him at the same time.
“Marcus,” my father says, composed. But his knees begin to buckle.
Arj manages a small grin as he presses his advantage. And now I am getting desperate, ducking and trying to get around my father’s back and getting nowhere. I am losing the assurance that there is anything I can do.
The grin gets a little broader as he makes his final move. His long, strong fingers move, migrate up, just a little, then a little more, until they find my father’s eyes.
There is a scream now, to unearth the dead of a thousand generations. The ground rumbles like an earthquake. At the far end of the circle, two giant stones, having stood for maybe thousands of years, topple over with a crash.
Only I am the one screaming. My father remains silent.
Even as the eyes burn in his head, I can see from my angle sparks leaping off the connection between those fingers and those eyes.
Unable to maneuver around him, I am now standing directly against my father, shoulder-to-shoulder, chest-to-back, head-to-head.