Mark of the Witch

by Maggie Shayne

  Tomas put a hand on my shoulder as I scanned the place so intently that my eyes hurt. “Stop trying so hard, Indy. Relax. Let the revelations unfold on their own.”

  I blinked at him and got caught in his eyes like a fly in a spider’s web. I saw so much there, caring and concern and a heavy grief. “Are you all right?” I asked softly.

  “No. No, I’m not all right at all. I don’t believe for one minute Jon would’ve taken his own life.”

  “No, I’ve been thinking the same thing. But what I can’t figure out is why the demon would want to hurt him when he was just about to give me the incantation that would allow me to retrieve the amulet. That’s what he wants, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know for sure that’s what he translated.”

  “I’m sure,” I told him. “I felt it in my gut as soon as you got off the phone with him this morning. And not just the spell we need, but more. The truth I must remember. God, Tomas, you don’t know how badly I want to read that part.”

  “I know. It might have answered all your questions.”

  “And maybe shown me what the hell I’m supposed to do.”

  He frowned. “You mean…with the amulet?”

  I nodded firmly and held his eyes, and I’m pretty sure my newfound inner strength was beaming from mine. “Yes, Tomas, that’s what I mean. I’ve seen the face of this so-called demon. It’s pain-racked and tormented. And I’ve heard the voice of my…my sister from that long-ago lifetime, commanding me—pleading with me, even—to help him. All that is pulling me in one direction. And then I’ve got you pulling me in the other. You, a man I once loved and who I’m starting to love again…”

  He blinked hard when I said that, even flinched a little, but otherwise he stood still and kept listening.

  “…but also a man I’m pretty sure helped to murder me, a man who chose his religion over his love for me. And at your side, pulling your strings like a puppeteer, there was—and maybe still is—an old priest I trust less than I’d trust a black widow not to bite.”

  I shook my head slowly. “I gotta tell you, Tomas, my feelings for you are the only thing coming down on your side in this. Everything else, including my own gut, is telling me to help the demon.”

  He sighed, lowering his head. “Thank you for being honest with me about that.”

  “What are you going to do, Tomas?” I searched his face. “What are you going to do if I decide to help him instead of you and Father Dom?”

  He dropped his gaze. “I don’t know.”

  That hurt. I wanted him to say he would respect my judgment, let me make my own choice and protect me from Dom when I did. But no. Instead I got an “I don’t know.” Which in my mind translated as “maybe kill you again.”

  That’s not what he said, dumb-ass.

  No. He didn’t say anything, really. Even though I just basically told the idiot that I’m falling in love with him.

  I had to turn away from his eyes, because they saw too much in me and I didn’t want him spotting the hurt. This wasn’t the time for this, anyway. We were close to something. I felt it. I started to pace away from him, one hand sliding along the railing, when I glimpsed something on the floor below us and came to an unsteady halt.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What is it?” Tomas walked quickly to where I stood, trying to follow my gaze. “Do you see something?”

  I nodded, opening my journal to the page where I’d drawn the intricate medallion shape. I pointed at it, then at the red carpet far below us.

  The same shape was right there. Right there on the carpet.

  “But…but that’s just a shadow.” Tomas turned, and I did, too. “See? The light is pouring through that window, angling downward so it passes through the railing—” He turned again, his finger tracing the path of the sunlight to the metal rail with its twisting patterns. “The railing is what’s causing the shape. It’s just a shadow, Indy.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s identical to my drawing.”

  He looked at the book, looked at the floor. I heard the shoes-on-metal sound of Rayne crossing the catwalk. Clearly she’d seen us pointing and was coming to investigate, and a few seconds later she was looking over my shoulder at the sketch and then at the shadow on the floor.

  “That’s amazing,” she said. “And even more so when you stop to think that if we’d been here an hour earlier or later, we’d never have seen it.”

  “Just like the tree,” I whispered. “The men were right there, ready to remove that branch. If we’d been even a few minutes later, it would have been gone.”

  She nodded slowly. “You’re channeling. The Goddess is guiding you with a steady hand, Indy. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Neither have I,” Tomas admitted. “You’re amazing.”

  I warmed at his praise and tried not to show it. “Let’s get down there.” I closed my hand around his. It was an impulse. I did it without stopping to think and was about to pull it away when he squeezed and kept my hand right there.

  “Come on. What are we looking for next?” he asked.

  “A dark doorway behind the medallion design,” I said. “There should be a statue near it.” I turned the page and revealed the next drawing even as we were hurrying down the stairs to the shadow on the floor, still holding hands, with Rayne right behind us.

  The place had only a handful of people in it. Students, maybe, or professors, visitors, researchers, who the hell knew? Ignoring them all, the three of us walked to the center of the medallion-shadow and stood there looking around.

  But there was no dark doorway. “It should be just above the curlicue in the medallion,” I said pointing it out in my sketch. “Just to the left of the clock.”

  “There’s no doorway there,” Rayne said, pointing, then jerking her hand down to her side again with a quick look around to see if anyone had noticed our touristlike enthusiasm. We did not want to draw attention. “Just the clock and the statue.”

  I looked back at my drawing. Why was everything there but the door? Suddenly Tomas swore under his breath, and my eyes shot to his. “What?”

  “The time, Indy. Look at the time.”

  I looked at the clock again. “Ten after five? God, have we really been wandering the campus looking for clues for two hours? Father Dom’s going to think we abandoned him.”

  “But look at the time,” he said, tapping my book, and I looked where his finger was. I’d drawn the exact same time that showed on the clock right now. The hands on my drawing were at precisely five and ten. But instead of feeling excited by yet another validation of my powers, I felt a little sick to my stomach. This was getting surreal.

  “But there’s no doorway,” Rayne said. “Just the statue.”

  The three of us moved toward what turned out to be a bust of a man, Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s cofounder and first president, and the man for whom this part of the library was named. Tomas looked behind the bust, even ran his hand over the wall, and shook his head.

  I lowered my own in abject disappointment, and then froze. “Tomas, the floor,” I whispered.

  He looked where I was looking. The plush red carpet was solid everywhere else, but there was a break, a seam in the shape of a large rectangle, around the pedestal on which the bust rested. As if there were a doorway under it, in the floor itself.

  “Could this be it?” Tomas looked at me.

  I nodded. It was. I felt it right to the roots of my hair.

  “Then there must be a way to open it,” he whispered.

  I turned the page in my journal. But I was all out of drawings, except for the one of my “treasure chest” at home. And then I looked at the bust itself.

  Rayne nodded at me. “That’s it, Indy. Use your inner eye. Try to see it through the eyes of magic, the Eyes of Spirit.”

  “Come on, Rayne. You and I both know the Eyes of Spirit are transferred as part of the third initiation. I haven’t even had my first yet.”

  “The Goddess give
s the power, Indy. We only hold a ritual to acknowledge and honor it. The power is already there. You’ve been a witch for more than three thousand years. I have no doubt you made it to the Third Degree during at least one of those lifetimes. Maybe all of them.”

  I lifted my head and looked into her eyes. What I saw there was absolute belief—in me. Then I looked from her to her brother, and he was gazing at me with something even more powerful. Something I didn’t dare analyze.

  But it filled me with belief. A belief stronger than any I’d had before.

  I stepped back several feet and stared at the bust, deliberately allowing my eyes to go blurry as I opened my energy pathways. I didn’t look directly at the statue, just let it fade and relaxed my mind.

  The man’s face was wise, with crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. He had a full beard and an impressive mustache. Folds of fabric made of white stone draped from his neck over the lapels of a stone suit jacket and a loop of twisted cord. It was all part of the bust and all made of the same white stone. But that loop seemed, in my eyes, to glow.

  “People are starting to stare,” Tomas whispered.

  I lowered my head, blinking my eyes clear, and wandered over to a nearby shelf to pretend to peruse the titles there.

  Tomas and Rayne were beside me in seconds. “Well?” Rayne asked.

  “It’s in that piece of the bust that looks like a loop of cord. There’s a switch or a lever or something. But how are we going to try this in broad daylight with all these people around?”

  Tomas looked over his shoulder, then back at me. “Return by night? After hours?”

  “No,” Rayne said. “With the bombing, and now what happened to Professor Yates, security here is going to be tight. And we sure as hell don’t want to upset any nervous cops on the hunt for terrorists.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  Rayne met my eyes. “You two find the restrooms, duck inside and wait five minutes. I’ve got this. Meet me back at the boulder when you’re done. I’ll catch up with Dom there and set his mind at ease.”

  “What are you going to do?” Tomas asked, looking worried.

  She leaned up and kissed her brother on the nose. “Just trust me. See you later.”

  And she turned and hurried across the red carpet, and within seconds she was gone.

  Tomas looked at me and shrugged. “I think I saw some restrooms before. Come on.”

  He led me back through the stacks and out of the reading room, wandering in what I was sure were random directions before stopping right in front of a pair of restrooms. “It shouldn’t be long,” he said, with a glance at his watch.

  He looked back at me, and then impulsively leaned down and kissed me quickly on the mouth before ducking through the gender-appropriate door.

  I blinked away my nervous smile and followed suit.

  Moments later the fire alarm went off. I closed my eyes and said, “Lady Rayne, you’re a freakin’ genius.”

  Only minutes later we were back in the A. D. White Room, standing alone in front of the bust. The library was even more mysterious and awe-inspiring now that it was entirely devoid of patrons.

  Tomas put both hands on my shoulders, as if to lend me his strength, as I reached out to touch that loop of twisted cord on Mr. White’s vestments. I ran my fingers over the cool, bumpy shape of it, pushed and pulled on it, but it didn’t move.

  Of course it didn’t move. It’s stone!

  But I kept trying, until my forefinger slid off the cord and into the circle at the center of the loop, and something clicked. Suddenly the entire bust, marble pedestal and all, began to move. I jumped backward, landing flush against Tomas’s chest, and his arms closed around me, holding me there. It was sexy as hell, and I wanted nothing more than to turn and look up into his eyes, maybe see passion starting to simmer there. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the statue.

  The pedestal rose slightly, maybe an inch, shoved upward as part of the floor also rose directly beneath it, then swung to the side, pivoting on one corner. Beneath it, a stairway spiraled downward into absolute blackness.

  15

  “What I wouldn’t give for a flashlight,” Tomas whispered.

  “There’s an app for that.”

  He looked at me with a puzzled frown as I pulled out my BlackBerry and turned on its LED light. It wasn’t as bright as a real flashlight, of course, but it would do in a pinch. And we were definitely in a pinch. I held it out in front of me and started down the steep metal staircase. The steps were narrow, but surprisingly solid for as old as they had to be. Even so, they wobbled just enough to make me uneasy, and they made enough noise to wake the dead.

  Tomas stopped behind me and called out in a harsh whisper, “Hold up a sec. Turn that light this way.”

  I did, and in a moment he took it from me, exploring the underside of the floor surrounding the door until he found what he was looking for. He touched something, and the floor above us moved itself back into place, lowered itself and blocked out the world.

  We were alone. Utterly alone, in absolute silence. The only sounds came from the two of us, our breathing and, in my ears, the pounding of my heart. He looked at me, and I at him. How long had I been waiting for a moment like this, a moment of absolute privacy with him?

  And yet, I couldn’t indulge myself in fantasizing about what would happen if I leaned up and kissed him just then. This was too important.

  God, I was sounding just like him. But I was feeling more and more as if I had been born for a reason. I’d been given powers, a connection to the other side, for a reason. And the reason had to do with this so-called demon—and with my own murder so many lifetimes ago.

  A murder in which my beloved Tomas had been my killer. My executioner. It didn’t seem possible.

  Sighing, I turned away from him, taking my phone with me. Aiming its light ahead of me, I started moving down the noisy stairs again. I saw nothing beyond the meager reach of the light. Only blackness. Our steps echoed and creaked and clanked. I hoped to the gods we reached the bottom before the firefighters arrived to answer Rayne’s fake alarm, though I knew the chances of them hearing us were slim. The air felt cool but surprisingly dry on my face, and I could smell earth and rock and soon…books.

  Yes, books. That unmistakable aroma of ink and paper and bindings. The same smell that had permeated the rooms above. It was, I realized, one of the best smells on the planet. Books.

  The stairs seemed to go on and on, and we just kept descending, but finally they ended at a flat stone floor. I held my light up, shone it around us, revealing a series of archways forming a circle around the base of the stairs, which had ended dead center. Five arches, I realized, each one with a symbol over the top.

  “They’re the Aristotelian symbols for the elements,” I whispered. I’d learned about them in my studies of the Craft of the Wise. I highlighted each of them with my light as I spoke. “Earth,” I said, aiming the beam at an inverted triangle with a line crossing through it. Then I shifted to the next archway, marked by the same symbol, only with the point upright, for Air, followed by the symbols for Fire, Water and Spirit over the remaining archways.

  “So which way do we go?”

  “I don’t even know what we’re looking for, Tomas.”

  “Information from the past. About a demon.”

  “Information would be Air. But the past, that might be Water. Demons are definitely spirit, though. Or maybe Earth…or…”

  “Can’t you…you know, use your…powers?”

  I met his dark eyes and felt the same stirring in my belly that I always felt when our eyes met. It was like connecting to a current when we touched gazes. Or lips.

  As I stared at him and forgot everything else, I said, “Truth. We’re seeking truth. That’s fire.” And I knew I was right. I moved toward the archway with the simple upright triangle. “This way.”

  He took hold of my hand. “Stay close, Indy. I’m feeling very antsy down here. I’m not sure it’s sa
fe.”

  I let him clasp my hand in his, relishing his touch, his protective attitude, his caring. “I feel safe with you, Tomas.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” he said softly, and I realized we were both still whispering, even though we had to be far out of earshot of anyone. Anywhere. This place, though, like the library above, resonated with a sacred energy, and it was that energy we were responding to with our respectful tones. Dark stone walls surrounded us, and combined with the stone floor to ensure that every footfall, every word, echoed.

  Even our whispers.

  I stepped beneath the fire arch and stopped, staring into the darkness beyond. I lifted my BlackBerry and aimed its beam ahead of me. It did little good. The light only reached a few feet.

  “I’m sorry, Indy.” I could tell from his voice that Tomas was close behind me. “I’m so sorry for what I did, the part I played in the past.”

  I stopped, my entire focus on those words, and a response spilled from my lips without me even knowing what I was about to say. It just came out. “I told you to do it. I begged you to do it, Tomas.” I blinked, as surprised by the words as his gasp indicated he apparently was, but at the same time knowing I’d spoken the absolute truth.

  I turned and stared into his eyes, lit from the glow of my phone. “You…you remember that?” he asked.

  Searching my mind, I realized that I did. “It just bubbled up out of me like some underground spring finally finding a path to the surface. You didn’t want to do it, even though you knew you’d be punished, maybe even executed, if you refused. They didn’t know about us—the powers that be, the high priest. They would have killed you, too, if you’d refused. And I would have died anyway. I couldn’t have borne it if you died, too.”

  “You loved me that much,” he whispered.

  Tears were burning in my eyes. The emotions of another lifetime, the heartbreak, bursting forth again, as fresh and sharp as if they were brand-new. “You loved me enough to condemn yourself to die with me. I couldn’t let you.”