He dragged with him two other figures, both of whom I recognized.
To his left was none other than Louis, sobbing and whimpering.
To his right was Jacob, the necromancer who belonged to the council in Savannah.
I stared at the scene, shaking my head. “Seriously?”
23
The black-robed powerhouse of a necromancer stood in the open mouth of the Jocos Mardi Gras ride in the middle of an abandoned amusement park, and let me tell you, I knew right then we’d been fooled and fooled good.
The rest of the Coven of Darkness, or so I assumed, filtered out of the maw of the ride and spread out to flank either side of him. Yes, I’d suspected they were working together, but for some stupid reason I hadn’t thought he’d be here.
Jacob—the necromancer from the Savannah council, keep up now—was gagged, and while Louis wasn’t, I didn’t see him being much help. Hell, he’d taken the fake fairy cross to this asshole necromancer who was running the show, I was sure of it. Maybe he’d been coerced, but knowing Louis, all the necromancer would have had to do was make him feel needed and important.
“Old woman,” the black-robed necromancer’s voice rasped out, a little different than before, harder now. “You came alone? That seems foolish. And unlikely. Search the area.” This last order was directed at the coven members, and they started forward.
I looked at Robert and he nodded. We stood and stepped out of our hiding place, circling around the debris of seats we’d been hiding behind. No need to get cornered.
“She did not,” I said. “Where is my gran? What have you done with her?”
The necromancer let out a laugh, and Louis leaned forward, bobbing as if in pain.
“Celia thinks she’s rather clever. Did you know she had a homing spell woven into her soul so her spirit would be magically transported the moment she entered New Orleans?” The necromancer said.
My guts about jumped out of my mouth. “And? What’s your point? You . . .” That’s when it hit me. He didn’t know where she was. The homing spell he was talking about had whisked her away from him. Oh, time for some epic putdowns.
I lifted both brows as high as I could and pointed a finger at him. “You lost her, didn’t you? What kind of necromancer are you that you lost my gran’s spirit? Have you been taking lessons from Louis?”
The hooded head whipped from side to side, and Louis writhed on the ground, a low moaning growl escaping him as if he were in great pain, his hands flexing and spreading as he clutched at his clothes. The necromancer fisted his hands. “You dare to challenge me? You dare to insult me? I, who taught these foolish witches how to steal the powers of others?”
The witches gasped and Penny clutched at her skirt. So that was how they’d learned—from a necromancer.
“Louis is a better necromancer than you!” I snapped, anger fueling me. Shit, Louis was about as good at being a necromancer as I was at being quiet once I was riled up. “Are you seriously telling me you lost her? YOU LOST MY GRAN?”
A roar rippled out of him, and Louis and Jacob both fell flat to the ground, shaking. “I will not be spoken to as if—”
“You’re a damn child!” I pointed a finger at him again, and Penny might have giggled. “Taking other people’s things and losing them like a toddler who doesn’t know any better!” Gawd in heaven, all the fear had leaked out of me, leaving behind the kind of righteous indignation that only shows up after you turn forty. Trust me on that one, it’s a powerful blend.
From the corners of my vision, I could see the witches from the Coven of Darkness circling around us. Well, that was just ducking awesome.
The necromancer jerked his hands above his head, and both Louis and Jacob were yanked to their feet as if by marionette strings. Jacob’s eyes were wide, Louis’s were shut tight, his lips moving in what was no doubt a whispered prayer.
Tension filled the air as we stood across from each other, the lines drawn in the sand. Me, Robert, and Penny against a monstrous necromancer and an entire coven of witches.
I swallowed hard. “Robert?”
“Yes?” He adjusted his stance.
“We’re gonna die, aren’t we?”
“Well . . .” He glanced at me, the corner of his mouth lifting. “You might, I’m already dead.”
Leave it to Robert to crack a joke right when we are about to go into a fight. I laughed. “Okay, will I at least be a badass skeleton like you? We can hang out in a graveyard together then, right?”
He shrugged, his blue eyes serious. “Only if you get cursed.”
I blinked and stared at him. “What?”
Of course, that’s when the coven came at us, cutting off the explanation I was now desperate to hear.
The witches lifted their hands, and a boom filled the air—not a thunderous sound, more like the ground itself was letting out a massive belch. The air grew thick, and the humidity suddenly ramped up over an impossible 100 percent, yet somehow it wasn’t raining.
“Damn it all. I told you to wait for me!”
We all twisted to see a figure I’d have rather not seen. I think. Missy strutted up the path, her own cane swatting at anything in her way. “Penny, I see the children are acting out again.”
Penny sighed. “It’s the same with every generation. In a hurry.”
They faced the coven together, Missy putting a hand on Penny’s shoulder as she drove her cane into the ground. Fissures shot out around her, a spiderweb of cracks, and a glow rolled around the two older women, lighting them up. Those fissures? They shot toward the different coven members. Whatever was in them packed a mighty wallop, because the witches yelped and danced backward, a few even passed out, hitting the ground with heavy thumps. The two old gals had given us a bit of breathing room.
“Won’t buy us much time,” Penny said as if reading my thoughts.
Missy dusted her hands in the air. “They don’t know what they are up against.”
I lurched forward and grabbed Penny by the arm, ready to take off, but the sound of leather on cement turned me around.
Well now, this was an unexpected twist.
A bevy of alligators (yeah, I don’t know if bevy is right, but let’s be honest, it’s a visual) crept toward us, a barrier of scales and teeth and muscle we couldn’t possibly dance across. They completely blocked the pathways, and as such, they pushed us toward the necromancer and the few coven members closest to him who were still standing.
The necromancer laughed. “My pets would like to make your acquaintance. You will take me to your gran, and I’ll let you three have an easy death.”
If that was his best offer, he had a lot to learn about negotiating tactics.
Penny stiffened under my hand. “Don’t you dare, girl.”
Missy shot me a look. “I’d get the spell book, at least.”
“Not planning on it,” I muttered. Only I didn’t know just how we were going to get out of this shit. I stared at the Jocos Mardi Gras sign and entrance. I knew there had to be a back way out of there, because Eric had gotten Charlotte free.
But that would mean going through the necromancer. And he was not going to be easily distracted.
Alligators behind, witches all around, badass necro in front.
I shared a quick look with Robert, and he nodded, as if he knew what I was thinking.
One shot, I’d get one shot at this. Flexing my hand around my knife handle, making sure my grip was perfect, I lurched forward in a lunge before my fear turned my guts to water. Going to one knee as if I were stumbling, cursing a blue streak from the impact of my knee against the pavement, I used the momentum of the movement to throw my turquoise-handled blade. End over end it went, sinking right into the middle of the necromancer’s face. A perfect shot.
He stumbled to the side, the handle sticking out of the darkness of the hood but did not go down. Damn it!
“Time to go!” I yelled at Penny, Robert, and Missy, taking the distraction for what it was worth. Alan was f
loating around, but I wasn’t worried about him. Like Robert, he’d show up when he felt like it. I sprung—okay, scrambled—to my feet and ran toward the necromancer. I shoved his still wobbling frame to the side, the ice cold of his body numbing my fingers, then grabbed the rope holding Jacob and yanked him along with us. “Louis, come on!”
He stumbled after us, less tied up than Jacob was because, of course, no one considered him a threat. Using my second knife, I cut through the bindings on Jacob, freeing him.
“Sweet baby Jesus, your knife barely even slowed him down!” Jacob gasped out as he yanked his gag off.
“Yeah, that can’t be good,” I said as we plunged into the darkness of the tunnel of the Jocos Mardi Gras. “Alan, can you find us a way out? Please!”
“Fine.” My ex-husband muttered and shot ahead of us, glowing for a moment and then disappearing.
Missy stomped along like some old school marm who might whack me with a belt if I weren’t careful, but Penny was breathing hard, and her shuffling gait told me we’d have to slow down soon. I sure as sugar on a funnel cake wasn’t leaving her behind. I turned to her as she called up a small series of lights that looked like lightning bugs.
“These will give us just enough to see by,” she said. “Gah, I’m slowing us down!”
Missy sniffed. “We could have taken them.”
“Really, you see that knife in his face?” I shot back at her.
Missy had no response for that, though she cast a glance at the bag on my hip, as if she knew Gran’s spell book was in there.
I held a hand out to Penny and she took it, leaning heavily on both me and the cane. Running wasn’t the best idea in here, but what other choice did we have? I looked back the way we’d come and didn’t like that our feet were the only ones shuffling along. The lack of pursuit meant we were sunk. They thought they had us.
“Penny, you think we just walked into a trap?” I asked quietly.
She paused, and her teeth flashed in a grimace that was only partly visible in the darkness. “Damn it. Most likely. Don’t think they’ll be letting us just walk away. Do you?”
“Of course, it’s a trap!” Missy snapped. “Fools. I told you to wait for me, but no, you always run in without me. Act first and think later and then expect me to get you out of trouble!”
I didn’t think she actually meant me and Penny. I suspected she meant Penny and my gran.
Robert kept close to my side. “We have to keep moving, you injured the necromancer, but I don’t think that it will do more than slow him down. Not if he didn’t take serious damage from getting his face sliced in half.”
Jacob limped a few steps behind me and Louis slumped along next to him, breathing hard and swearing in French under his breath, one hand pressed to his chest with his fingers spread wide.
I looked at Jacob. “You got any juice left?” I didn’t bother asking Louis—he’d barely had any juice to start with.
Jacob shook his head. “He drained Louis and me of our connection to the dead. It will take days to regenerate it. If it comes back at all.”
Of course, it had gone down like that. Our luck had pretty much run out, from what I could tell. I stepped over a rail that would have carried a cart full of park goers through the tunnel, helping Penny over it. A scuffling noise could be heard behind us, and we both turned, Penny holding her little lights high so we could see.
The multitude of glowing eyes near the floor told me all I needed to know. The gators were still on us and they were moving quicker now, pushed along by whatever magic held them. I was beginning to think they were not even alive. Hard to tell with a gator, but their eyes glowed a bright blue in the dark, and that was not normal. The objective was obviously to hurry us along to our deaths, and it was going to work at this rate. I motioned to Penny. “Come on, time for a piggyback.”
She didn’t argue, and I got her up and onto my back in a swift move. She was light, barely a hundred pounds, but I could feel the extra weight in the ache of my thighs and calves. I didn’t know how long I could carry her. What I wouldn’t give for a good dose of fairy honey right then.
Alan took that moment to drift back to us. “If you stay to the left, you’ll get out of here.”
“Thanks.” I adjusted my hold on Penny, and she tightened an arm around my neck. The pressure made me grimace, but I said nothing. Jacob and Louis took the lead, Missy right behind them, holding up a series of small magic lights. Robert stayed with me, about ten feet back from the two necromancers, and the gators scooted along about thirty feet behind me. I broke into a slow jog, just enough to keep us ahead of the many, many gator teeth in play.
“Something is off with this whole thing,” Robert whispered.
On my back, I felt Penny bob her head in agreement. “I don’t like it. Why didn’t they kill us out there? They had the fire power to do it.”
I focused on keeping my feet moving and under me as the sweat slid down from my armpits and dripped off the backs of my elbows. The slope of the tunnel was slowly going downward, following a set of tracks that had been part of the ride at one point, and I leaned back to counterbalance Penny’s weight. On the walls were paintings and 3-D caricatures on hinges that had them leering over our heads.
Creepy as hell if you asked me.
“I’m betting the necromancer needs you,” Penny whispered. “If Celia really did have a homing spell on her, then she could have keyed it to you and you alone. He may need your help.”
“Why didn’t he take me in Jackson Square then?” I gasped the words out.
“He tried,” Robert reminded me. “But you literally slid through his fingers. Maybe he didn’t realize yet that he needed you?”
“No, I think he did. I think he was testing my . . .”
Testing my defenses? As if my guts couldn’t be more twisted up, a scary as hell thought hit me.
Crash had been pulled away time and time again by the fae in the city.
Corb and Sarge were gone.
None of the local witches would even answer Penny.
We’d basically had a good chunk of our allies or potential allies stripped away.
Robert grabbed my arm and held me steady as the realization made me wobble. But gators and the witches of darkness were behind us, and there was nowhere to go but forward.
The tunnel smelled vaguely of smoke and dirty feet, which was a rather gross combination that made the big breaths I had to take even more uncomfortable. I wrinkled my nose, hating that I was breathing harder because I was packing Penny. But the thing was, I didn’t trust Jacob or Louis to take her, Missy couldn’t, and I wasn’t sure when Robert would suddenly turn back into a skeleton.
So me it was.
“Girl, this feels like the wrong way,” Penny said. “You sure about that ex of yours? Would he turn on you for any reason?”
The tunnel had leveled out, but it wasn’t going back up as if it would take us out of the ground. I swallowed hard. Would Alan turn on me? If the necromancer offered to restore him to life, he might. Crap.
“Alan,” I called out softly, trying to keep my tone nice. But there was no answer.
He wasn’t there. I frowned. Screw nice. “Alan, get your ass back here!”
Nothing.
Damn it all, I should have murdered him myself.
24
The realization that Alan had likely turned on me for some cheap trip off the necromancer really made the whole lost in a tunnel at an old amusement park bit that much worse. I mean, it hadn’t been great to start with, let’s be honest.
Jacob held up a hand. Behind us came the thumps of the alligators making the slide down the slope. I yelped as a scaled body thumped into the backs of my ankles. “Nope, not today, Satan!”
I all but sprinted forward, taking me and Penny well past Jacob, even hip checking Missy along the way, not on purpose, of course.
All of which was a terrible idea.
Because there was a cliff edge in front of us that I hadn’t se
en in the semi-darkness.
And Penny and I went straight over it.
She grabbed me harder around the neck, which caused instant strangulation. I couldn’t draw breath, which meant I was already hurting for air by the time we hit the water.
The cold water rolled over us both and Penny let go. I didn’t reach the bottom, but as I turned myself around to swim to the top my feet brushed something solid. I pushed off it, and it instantly gave way.
Not in the way of mud, but like something that was alive and swimming around under me.
I panicked and swam hard for the surface, the briny liquid working its way into my mouth as I tried not to scream underwater. Breaking through the surface, I turned toward the only visible light in that cold, dark, wet place, and swam hard toward it. I wasn’t going to think about what was in the water with us.
Not alligators.
Something large came off the cliff and hit the water, the sound putting a fire under my butt.
“Swim faster!” Jacob yelled unnecessarily from somewhere up above. “Swim faster!”
Panic clawed at my insides and I had a moment of fear that I was going to pee myself. Never mind, it wasn’t like anyone would be able to see anyway. I let loose, hoping that maybe alligators didn’t like pee. One could hope for a small miracle.
Ahead of me, I could just see Penny drag herself out of the water and up a rocky embankment. She was out at least.
Ten feet from shore, I reached down with my foot and hit solid ground. Another five feet, and I was in waist deep water.
Three feet out, a set of jaws clamped down on my left ankle and calf and yanked me off balance. I hit the water a second time with a much smaller splash, the ground knocking the wind out of me for a split second when I hit.
“Fuck!” I screamed as I got my air again, and the gator dragged me backward. I managed to grab onto an outcropping of rock, but the gator’s teeth were still crushing my ankle, driving spikes of pain up my leg that made me forget every other ache and pain I’d been dealt in the last few months. The water thrashed around us, and I was plunged under for several seconds before I managed to pull my head back up for a quick breath.
Midlife Ghost Hunter: A Paranormal Women's Fiction (The Forty Proof Series Book 4) Page 19