"As a Witch, you weren't vulnerable."
"But now he thinks I am," I hissed. "That bastard set me up to get warlocked."
"I would almost count on it." Crwys pushed back and stood next to Ivan. "I think they're going to try something stupid to get your attention and they're going to try and lure you to them."
I watched Ivan. "You already know this is true."
"Which is why we have to move on Ronald and his band of three nasty old men before he comes at you. Ronald has to have a home base, a place he can draw power from. And Ivan found that place in a residence in Picayune, Mississippi. It could be a home computer with a good sized hard drive with a lot of empty space—"
All of those calls from Pauline suddenly took on a greater importance. Dad talking to something in the house. Dad begging Pauline to call me because I could exorcise their home.
I threw the sheets off of me and slid out of bed, not caring if my bare ass was visible to anyone in the room. I didn't feel the dizziness I felt before when Cromwell took my Elementals. Instead I felt stronger. I willed the Hammer to revert to the charm and it did, with no spoken command. I put it around my neck. "Where's my phone?"
"It's with your things in that bag over there." Ivan pointed to the chair.
I grabbed the bag and dumped it out on the bed. My phone bounced to the right and I grabbed it, unlocking it immediately. There were three more missed calls, all from Pauline, all from yesterday. Nothing since. I redialed the last call and waited.
No answer. It didn't even flip to voicemail.
I played the messages. All of them said about the same thing. "Sam, I really, really need you to call us back here. There is something in this house and it's got your father all worked up. He's scaring me, and if you can't get here I'm going to have to call the doctor."
I tried my dad's landline.
The old answering machine picked up and I waited for the beep. "Dad it's Sam, can you pick up? If you don't know where my voice is coming from, it's the phone in the corner. The blue one."
I felt Crwys's and Ivan's eyes on me. I'd never told anyone about my dad's condition.
When he didn't pick up, I hung up and called Pauline's cell phone again.
This time it went to voicemail.
"Sam why did you call your dad?" Ivan said.
I stared at my phone. "What's the address you traced Kennett to?"
Ivan repeated it.
Crwys cursed under his breath.
"What?" Ivan said.
I turned and looked at him and it took a lot not to cry. "That's my dad's address."
Crwys drove a '64 Mustang Fastback. It was in cherry condition, but it couldn't carry everyone. Five comfortably. After an abrupt departure from the hospital, with yells of more tests, we got to Bell, Book and Candle in record time. The weather at least had cleared up a bit. Scattered clouds moved over the sky, throwing shadows on the December morning. The temperature was in the lower fifties, which was cold for the South.
I ran upstairs and changed clothes, refusing to look at the break room, the scene of my incarceration. I wasn't sure I could ever go back into that room without suffocating when I thought of the looks on my Elementals' faces. I worried about them, how they were being treated, if they were being misused or neglected, and decided it didn't matter what sort of heinous crimes a Witch committed—punishing the Elementals was not acceptable. It wasn't their fault.
New jeans, tank top, shirt and jacket, new socks and then boots. The Hammer buzzed against my chest, warm and almost comforting. I felt good. Really good. And powerful, even though I shouldn't. Not with my essence capped.
Once I had everything I needed, I went down the stairs and heard the others talking in the break room. I stopped where I was and listened. I didn't snoop normally, but when I heard my name mentioned, I reacted.
"…normal. This is dangerous shit here." That was Kyle. "I don't care if it seems right or feels right to her. She shouldn't be using Arcane."
"I just want to know how she's using it. Shugar, I got all kinds of horror stories in my family of members trying to make that shit work. The results will curl your hair," Arden said.
"Arcane or not, what's dangerous is there is a Shadow Asshole still out there with a vendetta against me and Sam," Ivan sounded angry. I'd never heard that tone from him before.
"Why would this dead person have a vendetta against Sam?" Arden asked.
"Why else zero in on her dad's home?" Levi chimed in. "I'm gonna go with Ivan on this one. The kids are safe, and Arden came out smelling like a rose while Sam, who put all this together, got warlocked. That's not fair."
"Life's not fair."
"Bitch, you need to show a bit more respect."
"You need to take care who you're talking to, Leech," Arden's tone hardened.
The level of discord they were creating unnerved me. I needed help getting to my dad's house and I needed a bonded team working together to rid the world of Ronald Kennett. I closed my hand around the USB at my neck and felt the surge of power, of adrenaline.
Two weeks ago I'd run off and tried to solve my own problem with the Leviathan because everyone had been taken from me. Now, when I thought I had everyone's support, I realized I didn't when I really, really needed them.
I wasn't sure how I was going to kill this son of a bitch. I just knew I had to. And I didn't need a moral contingent keeping me back. I quietly moved back up the stairs and out to the veranda that spanned the length of the building overlooking Bourbon Street. My Jeep was parked in back so I climbed down the fire escape.
Hands grabbed my hips as my boots touched the ground and I spun to see Crwys smiling at me. "What are you doing?"
"Making sure you don't do something stupid on your own."
"I'm not going back in there. Half of them don't trust me just because of the Arcane."
He glanced over at his car where Grey stuck her head out the driver's window. "Grey and I have confidence in you. We're just not going to let you go by yourself."
"It's an hour or so drive."
"I'm a cop."
And Crwys used that to his advantage. Once we hit the expressway, he set a flashing light on his dashboard. "I have a price for this."
I rolled my eyes. Figured.
"You tell me everything. And I mean everything. What really happened in Ina's house? And don't say nothing because you forget, Ivan and I were the ones to find you."
"I'm surprised he didn't come with you."
Crwys grinned. Dear Lady he had the cutest dimples when he did that. "Me meeting you at the fire escape was his idea." He reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a note.
I opened it and read Ivan's all caps type.
Get out there and go with her. This group's not ready to help her, not the way you can. They can't see past their own fears and prejudices to realize Sam's got something different going on. I don't know what it is. Maybe you do. I'll stay here and create the copy she wanted. When you save her dad and step mom, come back and we can work on hiding the book in a place the Clerics can find it. That should be enough for them to remove the warlock.
And take Grey. You two should really come clean about the truth.
I
I held the note out. "What truth? What's he talking about?"
Crwys touched the note and it evaporated. Just turned to ash and disappeared. Damn I hated when he did that. "I have no idea what he’s talking about. Just know that Ivan's going to get us the prop we need to clear you and Arden. He's also going to work on clearing up planted evidence out there."
"How?"
"You concentrate on telling me what I asked for."
"What about Levi?"
"He and I are in constant communication. He knows what I'm doing."
I had no idea what that meant.
The drive took just under an hour with Crwys driving like a crazy person cop. I told him everything that happened that night, from getting back to the house and thinking Ina was a Ghoul, to the reality
of what I'd done when I killed Arwen and learning Ina wasn't one of Dionysus's Ghouls, but the Leviathan himself. Ina had been that very Leviathan all those years, hiding quietly and patiently in my life, invisible to everyone.
"Because Medbh removed Ina's soul." Crwys's jaw worked a bit as I watched him. Grey's head rested on my left shoulder where she stuck her head between the front seats. "Even I didn't realize what she was. I mean Levi and I always sensed she was powerful, but I just thought that was a Witch thing."
I watched him for a while as we entered Picayune city limits and he slowed the car down. "You don't hate me?"
He glanced at me and I moved back. His brows knitted together over his nose and his eyes were red. "Hate you? That bastard tricked you. Groomed you. Hell, he had a spell woven into the simplest of tasks just to find out everything you knew everyday."
He was talking about the peeling of apples. All those years I peeled apples for Ina's pies and told her about my day, what I did, whom I talked to, and what I said…and never realizing until that night two weeks ago that Ina never made an apple pie. "It doesn't change the way I feel about myself."
"If you didn't feel guilt, then I would be mad at you. You wouldn't be human. That's what makes you special to me." He turned the car down all the right roads until we came up on the two-story my dad bought after he and Pauline married. Their cars were still in the driveway and it looked like Pauline had started putting up Christmas decorations. That hideous plastic snowman was out by the porch steps and red glittery garland, much like Arcane Magic, was wound around the porch support beams.
All three of us piled out of the car and approached the house. I retrieved my Smith & Wessons as Crwys pulled his Desert Eagle out of its holster. We came up the drive to the garage and I punched in the code. The garage door opened with a loud, grinding sound.
"So much for the element of surprise," Crwys quipped.
"It's not a surprise," I said. "If Kennett's in there, then he's in the house's security system. See the cameras? He already knows we're here."
I absently tried to send out my feels and realized… I couldn't. I wanted to call up my Elementals and knew they couldn't hear me. I was really on my own on this. No magic crutch. No way of exorcising this asshole if I found him at all.
I had Arcane. Big deal? They were just spells in a book crunched down into microscopic bytes of data in a USB around my neck. How was I supposed to fight something like Kennett? I wasn't a Cyber Witch like Ivan. I couldn't grab kitchen herbs and bind an enemy like a Hedge Witch.
Why was I here? I could shoot a flea off an armadillo's back, but bullets were useless against shadows.
Crwys and I quietly moved to the door in the garage. This door would lead into the kitchen, then into a private den and the dining room. Pauline had moved Dad into the downstairs bedroom because it made it easier to manage him when he had one of his episodes. I noticed the bars on the kitchen door window as I removed my key from my back pocket and unlocked the door.
The instant I opened the door I smelled it. No other thing in the world had that scent.
Blood.
Crwys put his hand up to stop me from bolting in. He signaled me to move in behind him. He held his weapon in front of him and quietly, slowly, moved into the house. I was close behind him, my weapons pointed down so I didn't shoot him in the back.
The house was still and the smell was overwhelming. Fear crept along my shoulders as we moved from the kitchen to the three-door portal. The door in front of us went to the private den, the door to the right opened into the dining room, and the door on the other side of that room opened into the front hall and the front door.
I gestured with my left hand and gun to the den. That's where my dad hung out with Pauline most days.
He nodded slowly and stepped in through the door.
The moment I put my foot through the threshold, I knew.
I knew because I saw her bloody hand sticking out from between the couch and coffee table. I gasped. Crwys sighed as he moved around and looked at me. He could see the whole room. "Sam…don't…"
But I was already moving further in. My stare focused on Pauline's hand and traveled down her arm to her dark hair. She lay face down on the carpet, a dozen or so splotches of blood on her back, bleeding into the fabric of her blouse. Her skin was gray and I knew before Crwys bend down to press his fingers at her neck, Pauline Hawthorne was dead.
Another woman in teddy bear scrubs lay on her side, just past the couch. Her dark skin was ashen in death. Blood soaked through the cartoon bears, marring their happy smiles. This was probably the new nurse Pauline said they hired.
I sensed what was just past the nurse. Maybe I'd caught a glimpse of it when I looked around. Maybe it was just an image from a nightmare. I didn't want to look, but I had to.
There was no going back.
Dad sat in his favorite chair by the fireplace. It gave him an excellent view of the new flat screen I'd bought them last Christmas. His mouth was open in a silent scream below wide eyes that stared at something terrifying. In his right hand he held the hilt of a knife. The blade was buried in his chest.
I brushed past Crwys and I dropped to my knees beside my dad's chair. I half dropped, half set the guns on the floor and tentatively touched his neck. I knew before I did that he was dead. Been dead. It was evident in the white film over his eyes and the sticky blood coating his chest and shirt. I heard whimpering noises and thought Grey was beside me. I realized I was the one making them as I pawed at his arm and then took his other hand in mine and pressed it against my face.
There is nothing, I think, more devastating than losing a parent. Parents may say the opposite when losing their child. But I had no real memory of my mother. My father had been my world for so long, even when he buried himself in his work and turned his affections toward Pauline. I'd still loved him.
I'd always loved him. He was all I had. The only family I knew.
There were more of those noises and I felt Crwys's warm hand on my arm. "Sam—"
"Stay away from me!" I yelled and slapped him away. He wasn't going to take me away from my dad.
My daddy.
I moved up from my knees and touched his head, his cheek, his neck, but every contact repeated the same thing to me. He was gone. Deal with it.
Just deal with it, Sam.
"Sam…I need to call this in to the locals. It looks like he stabbed your stepmom, that nurse…and then himself."
"No!" I jumped up and struck Crwys hard across the face. I wasn't in control anymore. I was an exposed, raw nerve, bleeding out beside my dead parent. "No! He did not kill her!"
I wouldn't look at him. I couldn't look at him. I kissed my father's cheek. I wanted to scream. I wanted to…
What I wanted couldn't happen.
It wasn't possible.
And when Crwys started laughing, I grabbed one of my guns and put it in his face. "Stop it."
But Crwys wasn't the one laughing.
He reached up and pushed the barrel of the Wesson away. "Sam, I need you to get a grip. We're not alone."
The laughter deepened and I looked at my dad, and then at Pauline's body. It was the same laugh I'd heard at Ina's that afternoon, the voice of the uncle man. But it also sounded…mechanical. Tin-like. As if it were coming through a speaker.
That's when I spotted the TV speakers. There was one on the mantel, one on a bookshelf near the door, and one at a destroyed computer in the back of the room. I slowly pivoted to look at the computer and a shadow moved across the wall.
Shit!
"Look out!" I screamed.
I dove at Crwys as the Shadow blurred and ran toward him. It brushed my arm and froze my skin as Crwys and I went down between the fireplace hearth and the coffee table at my dad's feet.
"Mother fucker," Crwys said as he sat up and looked around the room. "We know it's you Ronald. You're in the Hawthorne hard drive."
"Of course it's me," came a computer-generated voice through the
speakers. "But I'm Soul Machine now. I am a soul, in the machine!" He laughed again.
"Why did you kill my parents?" I stood, slapping at Crwys's hands trying to keep me on the floor.
"Oh…they killed themselves. It was easy to drive your dad insane. He was already halfway there, Samantha. I never knew Witches were real until I started searching for whatever it was that hacked my machine. It left no footprint. No signature. Not even an IP. Nothing."
"That was Ivan."
"Yes…" The Shadow reappeared on the back wall. It looked like it did that day in Ina's kitchen. Like a man with no detail. Except it was much, much shorter. Its legs were truncated, a third the length of its arms. Crwys stood and we both faced it. "Ivan. But I didn't find him till he revealed himself, and by then I knew about the Malleus Maleficarum. The real deal. A book that could give me back my body."
Crwys made a rude noise. "That's not going to happen, Ron. Your body is dead. You neglected it."
"I AM SOUL MACHINE!"
I narrowed my eyes and snarled at the wall image. "You are nothing but a piece of forgotten shit, you son of a bitch. You killed three men trying to get out of the machine, Ron. You thought those old men were your ticket. Realized you were pretty much pointless in there so you slaughtered three more innocent lives. You're sick. You should be put down. Erased like erroneous data. Garbage in, garbage…out."
The shadow came at me. I fired off a few rounds, but bullets couldn't hit Shadows but they made nice holes on the opposite wall, smashing one of Pauline's paintings.
Bullets might not be able to strike the Shadow, but he was solid enough to shove me against the fireplace and knock the wind out of me. I fell to the floor and when Crwys tried to help me up, the Shadow knocked him backwards, crashing into the TV and onto the floor.
Before I could right myself, something grabbed me around the neck and squeezed. I looked to see the Shadow, no longer a two dimensional aberration against a wall, but three dimensional and choking the shit out of me. I grabbed at my neck as I scrambled on the ground, trying to kick the thing in the back. But it wasn't solid! I couldn't put my fingers around anything and my knees came up and through the thing.
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