The Demon Redcoat

by C. C. Finlay

  “Now what do we do?” Lydia asked.

  “We can take it to our room and—”

  He stopped in mid-sentence because the cat suddenly grew ten times heavier. He and Lydia were pulled toward each other as the cat’s sudden weight dragged it to the ground, but neither one of them let go. Not even when it started to grow and transform in their hands. As they held tight, the squirming, struggling creature turned into an old woman in a raggedy black dress. Strands of lank white hair escaped from her hood. She writhed and slapped at them, speaking in a strange language neither of them understood.

  Proctor had a firm grip on her shoulder and arm, which felt as fragile and brittle as the cat. Lydia let go and glanced around, expecting someone to answer the old woman’s cries for aid.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Proctor clamped a hand over the old woman’s mouth, wincing as she bit him. “There was an empty stall in the stables—”

  “Let’s go,” Lydia said, banging the door open.

  The old woman kicked and scratched as Proctor dragged her out the door and through the alley, but she was thin and weak, frail to the point that Proctor feared she might break in half if they shoved her too hard. The mules flicked their ears as Proctor and the old woman passed them. Lydia followed behind, scattering the straw over the marks created by the old woman’s dragging heels.

  The new location had the smell of manure and the buzz of flies, guaranteeing, he hoped, some greater measure of privacy. “We have to question her,” Proctor said. “But I have no idea what she’s saying.”

  Lydia stood by the stall door, biting her lip. “I know a prayer …”

  The old woman bit Proctor’s hand again, the soft spot between his thumb and forefinger. If she’d had a few more teeth, it might have hurt enough to let go. “I’m listening.”

  “I learned it from observing Miss Cecily,” Lydia said.

  That explained her hesitation. “Your intention is not to do harm, it is to stop harm.”

  The old woman struggled harder, thrashing her legs and scratching at Proctor’s hand, trying desperately to pull it away from her mouth. The mules shifted uncomfortably at the struggle.

  Lydia covered her ears with her hands. Proctor thought it was to shut out what he was saying, but then he could feel her working a spell. The old woman stopped her struggles and watched Lydia with wide eyes. When Lydia reached out and touched the old woman’s ears, she began to tremble in Proctor’s grip. Then Lydia touched Proctor’s ears and he felt a piercing sting.

  Maybe there was something to the idea that some magic was by its very nature evil, regardless of intention.

  Lydia bowed her head and folded her hands together. “Dear Father, let us by the manifestation of the Spirit be given to us to profit withal, to the understanding of tongues, that we may know what this woman says, and that she may understand us, that we may ease her fright and discover her purpose.”

  The old woman’s body began to shake with sobs. Proctor let go of her mouth, though he was ready to cover it again the instant she started to scream or cry for help.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” the woman said, her voice little more than a whisper. It was odd: her words still sounded strange and foreign, but Proctor found he understood them. “Don’t hurt me.”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Emazteona, but I am called Urraca. How—?” She tried looking over her shoulder at Proctor, but she was afraid to take her eyes from Lydia. Her question trailed off in a mixture of uncertainty and tears.

  “Don’t be frightened, Urraca,” Lydia said. “Why did you make the Americans sick?”

  “A great sorcerer came to me in a vision of fire while I was in my town of Etxebarri. He hates the American rebels, wants to see all the American rebels destroyed. He promised … things … to anyone who would help him. I went to the coast, to the sea, because I thought, if Americans come here, that is where they will land.”

  “How were you to get in touch with him?”

  “He promised he would find me, flying like a spirit in the dark.”

  Proctor tensed. Could it be the prince-bishop? The man who stole his finger and held a leash on his soul. “What did he look like, this man?”

  “Very old,” Urraca said. “But not old. He was thin, and wore long robes, and had a beard …” She dissolved into tears again, the way she did every time Proctor spoke to her.

  Proctor looked up at Lydia. “That doesn’t sound like the German.”

  “An associate of his, perhaps?”

  “Yes, one of the twelve,” Urraca said, licking her lips nervously. “He said there were twelve spots at his side, twelve places for the immortals. I am old, and have no one, but if I helped this sorcerer, then I might be young again, I might be rich.” She looked at her bare feet, covered with sores and calluses. Her toes ended in cracked and yellowed nails. “I could buy a pair of shoes. And a mule to carry me so I never have to walk again.”

  She sighed and collapsed pathetically. Her body sagged against Proctor, weighing no more than a bag full of rags and sticks, just like Bootzamon.

  “What is the sorcerer’s name?” Proctor demanded.

  She glanced from Lydia’s feet to Proctor’s to her own. Proctor’s shoes were scuffed and scraped by the hard mountain roads, but he suddenly felt very wealthy to have them. Urraca sobbed into her fists, unable to answer.

  “I want to feel harshly toward her,” Proctor said to Lydia. “She meant to sicken Adams and his sons until they were dead, but she seems so small and hopeless and afraid.”

  The old woman clawed ineffectually at Proctor’s hand, which still gripped her. She muttered “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you” as if it were a rosary.

  “I think that this is what our enemy does,” Lydia said. “He plays on people’s fears to make them use their talents for him.”

  Proctor could see what she meant at once. “He doesn’t need one big plan or one agent—he prepares thousands of them. Everyone with a talent who hides it out of fear, every old woman who possesses one or two spells and nothing else, anyone with a grievance who is willing to use a charm or focus prepared by someone else. One man sabotages a ship in Boston, an old woman makes someone sick in Spain, a third person waits already at the next spot on the road.”

  “He can have an army at his command,” Lydia said.

  But Proctor had spent time in the army and around it. “It’s not the same. He doesn’t organize everyone to work together toward a goal. He winds them up and sends them out on their own, to accomplish it however they see fit. An army can be defeated by another army. But how do you stop a thousand different agents?”

  Lydia shrugged.

  “You have to defeat the leader,” Proctor said, answering his own question. “So we have to find out who he is. You spent your whole life with Cecily—do you have any idea?”

  She shook her head. “Cecily was rising through their ranks. She was an apprentice to the widow Nance until you and Deborah killed her. Then the prince-bishop found her and she became his protégée. Unless he’s the leader, the man we’re searching for—”

  “I don’t think he is,” Proctor said. “But he’s near the top, of that I am certain.” The old woman was still weeping, weak and limp in his grip. “Can you put a binding spell on her, something to keep her from harming anyone? Or hold her, and I’ll do it.”

  “No, I can do it,” Lydia said. She pulled a thread from her hem, then tore one from Proctor’s coat, and took a third from the old woman’s dress, braiding the threads together. “She has only a small talent and shouldn’t be that dangerous. What if she goes to the sorcerer she described and brings him to us?”

  “Then we’ve found the man we were searching for,” Proctor said.

  Lydia tied the braided thread around the old woman’s wrist, and put a binding on her to do no harm to anyone. The old woman tried to untie it and pulled her hand back as if stung. Proctor released her and she sprawled into the straw, crawling
out of the stall on her hands and knees like an animal. It was one of the saddest things he had ever seen.

  “It seems wrong somehow,” he said, thinking about his mother, and her fears of being discovered for a witch. Of Deborah, and her fears of being an old woman, kicked from door to door, muttering petty curses out of spite. “That we faced a demon in our own home and have come this far in search of its master only to face a woman as sad as this, one we would try to help in any other circumstance. I wish—”

  “What do you wish?”

  Lydia stared at him, expecting him to continue, but he could scarcely see her. The manure and flies had already faded from sense, and the walls of the stable were flimsy gauze, and Lydia was little more than a ghost. Dizzy, he groped for something to hold on to, trying simply to stay upright. Then he felt himself falling.

  It was as though a hand reached inside him and grabbed him by the breastbone. He felt himself skimming over mountains in a blur of light and snow, then out over an ocean as smooth as glass over sunken stars. A second later, he was falling through clouds like a wounded bird. The clouds parted and the land opened up below him. He was dropping toward The Farm.

  He saw Deborah through the walls of the house. She was lying on her bed, eyes closed, arms folded on her chest. Abigail stood over her, holding Maggie in her arms. Maggie had grown so big. She was holding her head up, leaning toward her mother. Abigail had to pull her away. What was happening—was Deborah dead? Proctor plunged from the sky and reached through the wall to touch his daughter.

  And then he sensed it. A presence waited for him, a spirit lurking at the edge of his mind, ready to break in. Behind the vision of Deborah, something else waited for him. It lunged at him like a serpent, and he could feel the poisonous fire of its fangs scrape against him.

  Back in the stall, so far away it was like it was happening to a different person, he felt Lydia take hold of his hand.

  As the presence lunged at him, he pulled away and snapped back to his body like a bowstring released by an archer. His spirit flew like an arrow, back to his body, but when it pierced his chest and he landed there, he couldn’t move his limbs. His stomach churned nauseously and his head pounded as the light faded to black. The last thing he felt was Lydia’s hands wrapped around his, but it was as though they were both wearing heavy mittens. The last thing he heard was her voice, muffled and far away, as if calling from another room.

  “Proctor—what just happened? Proctor!”

  Chapter 10

  Six hundred hooves pounded the dusty Carolina road, a steady drumbeat to the melody of the songbirds in the trees and underbrush. The dark green jackets of the British Legion blended in with the foliage, and the hard black caps on their heads gleamed like the carapaces of predatory insects.

  Only they were no longer called the British Legion. They were now just as often referred to as Tarleton’s Raiders. Banastre Tarleton, the brash young commander of this group of American Loyalists, took pride in the appellation. They had been forged into a single unit during that first raid together on Pound Ridge, New York, the year before. The new year meant a new campaign in the South as British forces finally made progress against the rebel armies. Tarleton had already made his name. The right victory would cement his reputation and might even make his fortune.

  A voice chuckled behind him.

  Tarleton turned and noticed a hatless boy with an unruly tousle of blond hair. He wore a red coat, like the British regulars, which was as out of place among the light dragoons as his age. The boy’s eyes were unsettling. When Tarleton met those eyes, he felt as though someone—or something—else were looking at him from behind them. A shiver ran through his spine.

  His horse nickered and tossed its head. Tarleton turned to it and looked at the road ahead. He had the sense that he’d just a moment ago been thinking about something or someone …

  He spurred the horse ahead of his men. He had a reputation for leading from the front to uphold. The men looked to him as their model. The rebel forces were nearby, and Tarleton meant to catch them.

  The scouts reported that the rebels’ Colonel Buford had come with three hundred and fifty or four hundred Continental soldiers, the entire Third Virginia detachment, to reinforce the Americans at Charleston. They hadn’t known that Charleston had already surrendered—the greatest British victory of the war since Brooklyn. A whole army lost to the rebels, thousands of men. When Buford’s men had found out that Charleston was lost, they’d turned tail and headed back for Virginia as fast as their horses would carry them.

  But not, hopefully, as fast as Tarleton’s Raiders could catch them.

  It would be worthwhile just to spank them for the spoiled colonial brats they were. But John Rutledge, the pretender to South Carolina’s governorship, was with them. Catching Rutledge would take all the wind out of the rebels’ sails. Following the loss of their army at Charleston, it might break the colonies’ back. String up a few of the leaders, and the followers would fold. The bloodshed would be over. America and Great Britain could return to the natural state that history and logic preferred for them.

  As he hopefully considered that prospect, Tarleton looked back at his own men. They were called the British Legion, but every man of them was born in the colonies and came from America. The difference between his men and the rebels was that his men knew where their true allegiance and interest lay.

  Well, that, and they could fight. He’d take one of his men to lick two or three of the rebels any day.

  At the edge of his vision, he glimpsed a boy in a red coat, out of place among all the green jackets of his men. Tarleton had no idea who the boy was or where he came from, but he meant to find out …

  Hoofbeats galloped on the road ahead, and he turned to see who was coming. The newcomers were hidden by the hills and the dense trees.

  A figure rounded a bend in the road. Matthews, his shaggy-haired, perpetually unshaven scout. The man’s beard grew in so fast, the shadow returned to one side of his face while he was shaving the other. Tarleton held up his hand, bringing the men to a stop. Matthews reined in his horse at Tarleton’s side.

  “Report,” Tarleton said.

  “They’re just short of the crossroads a couple of miles ahead,” Matthews said. “Closer to four hundred than three.”

  Tarleton looked back at the hundred and fifty men riding with him, and could feel that they were on edge. Almost four hundred rebels. How much did he believe his own braggadocio? Was every one of his raiders really as good as two rebels?

  “Go kill them,” whispered a boy’s voice, almost in his ear. “Go kill them all.”

  Tarleton shook off the shiver that ran through his skin. He had a second group of men coming four or five miles behind. He nodded to Matthews. “Go back and tell the reserves to get their asses up here. If they can’t run, they damned well better sprout wings and fly. I want them here now.”

  The scout snapped a crisp salute. “Yes, sir.”

  Tarleton returned the salute, and the scout peeled away, wheeling his horse around the other men in the narrow, tree-lined road. Matthews had been fortunate enough to find a good horse, one bred for racing, after all their animals had died during the gruesome ship’s voyage from New York. He could not forget the backbreaking work of shoving all the dead horses overboard, nor the feeling that it had been unnecessary, that they were plagued by something that delighted in death.

  Now they took what ever poor screw they could find, the men rode the horses to death, and no one knew how his mount would act in battle. No wonder the men were on edge.

  “Captain Kinlock!” Tarleton shouted.

  David Kinlock had been with the legion since ’78. His curly red hair originally led Tarleton to expect a man with either a temper or a sense of humor, or both. Kin-lock had neither. He was a good soldier, and played poker with one of the straightest faces Tarleton had ever seen. In typical fashion, he waited a moment, then walked his horse slowly out of line up to Tarleton’s side.
/>   “Sir,” Kinlock said.

  “These colonials were too cowardly to join real fighting men like those in the legion,” Tarleton said, raising his voice enough to carry all the way back the line. The comment brought a few grins. “Therefore I want you to take a flag of truce and see if they’re willing to surrender. It’d be a shame for us to have to hurt them.”

  That won a few snickers, but the men still sounded nervous.

  “And Kinlock,” Tarleton said.

  “Sir,” Kinlock said, not having moved or reacted since Tarleton’s original statement.

  “Why don’t you make the decision easy by telling them we’ve got seven hundred troops here? We outnumber them two to one. They’ll see the wisdom of surrender then.” He watched the men nod to one another and sit back in their saddles. In the short run, this group always appreciated craftiness over praise. “Tell Buford that, resistance being vain, to prevent the effusion of human blood I make offers that shall never be repeated. He has but one chance.” Tarleton surveyed his men and saw their approval. Turning back to Kinlock, he said, “What’re you waiting for, Captain?”

  “You, to make sure you’re done talking,” Kinlock answered laconically.

  That sort of cheek would be insubordination in the regular army, but among colonials it was a sign of affection. Tarleton waved Kinlock off unceremoniously, and the captain unfolded a white handkerchief and tied it to his gun barrel as he trotted away.

  Tarleton sent out flankers through the trees to keep rebel scouts or their local allies from discovering his true numbers. Then he formed up the men he had and pushed ahead, hoping Matthews would bring up his reserves before Buford crossed the border into rebel-held territory. With luck, he could bluff Buford and the colonials into surrender.

  “There will be bloodshed,” whispered a voice beside him.