Bad Omen: Morrighan House Witches Book Two

by Amir Lane

  There was something in one of her blind spots. She could feel it, almost see it in a way she never could before, but it was still beyond what she had the ability to perceive. Maybe she’d gotten used to the random cold spots that came with Dieter’s spirits, but Alistair had set off her inner alarms from day one. Now? Every instinct she had was telling her to get the fuck out of there, but her feet were stuck to the ground. She couldn’t make herself move. Curiosity, fear, concern for her brother, whatever it was, it kept her firmly rooted in place.

  “Dieter,” she said urgently, grabbing his arm, “let’s go. You’re right, we shouldn’t be here.”

  Dieter pulled his arm out of her grip, still staring straight ahead with a look between dazed and shocked on his face.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you,” he said. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  Whatever he was speaking to didn’t respond. Not in any way that she could hear, at least. But Dieter stepped back, holding a hand up as if to keep something away, and Lindy had to fill in the rest.

  It always looked ridiculous, Dieter interacting with his Shadows, talking to and reacting to something nobody else could see. They were usually harmless. Apparently, most spirits weren’t powerful enough to affect anything.

  But if there was a spirit powerful enough to do some real damage, it would be Alistair.

  And Dieter was smiling like it was the same guy who’d… done whatever it was that had made Dieter fall in love with him.

  Lindy couldn’t see anything with all the spirits in the room, but she didn’t need to be able to see to know that this wasn’t going to end well. All they had to protect themselves was Dieter’s powers and the charms that Yasir and Selima had given them. Sure, they looked nice, but nice didn’t do much when facing the angry, murdered spirit of a Necromancer. She usually had no affinity for sensing spirits, but even she could feel the unrest in the air. She smoothed her hands over her arms. It did nothing to settle her skin.

  “Dieter,” Lindy said, her voice low but as stern as she could make it.

  Dieter ignored her.

  The only way out of the kitchen was the doorway that they’d come through behind Dieter.

  At this point, Lindy had three options: grab Dieter and get them out whether he liked it or not, push him aside and leave him there, or wait and see how this played out. Maybe Dieter could control Alistair. He already had four spirits under his control, making him one of the most powerful Necromancers she had ever heard of. What was one more?

  Was that how this even worked?

  And of course, Dieter just went on talking to Alistair.

  "I'm sorry about what happened to you. I never wanted you to die. I miss you."

  Dieter flinched back. The cabinets flew open hard enough that a door came off its hinges. Lindy threw her hands over her head. Dammit, she should have gotten them out of there when she had the chance. It was probably too late now. She wished she could see Alistair, physically or otherwise. Anything would have been better than being in the dark.

  "I didn't want to hurt you! You're the one who lost control. I know it's my fault you died, but I had no choice. You would have killed me first. You almost did kill me!"

  Lindy had to duck to avoid the chair that was hurled in her direction.

  "Dude!"

  "Leave her out of this, Alistair. This is between you and me. It always was."

  It was hard for Lindy to hear what Dieter was saying over the sound of her heart pounding in her ears. Fucking fantastic. Of course this spirit wanted to kill her, too.

  "Your brother is killing people, Alistair. He's killing witches. Mohr's Circle witches. All of you, stop screaming!"

  Lindy didn't hear any screaming. She never did. It was something only Dieter heard. He moved his head, following the path of Alistair or one of his other spirits. She couldn't tell.

  “Are you making him do it?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “Are you?”

  There was a heavy pause.

  “You’re not Alistair,” Dieter whispered.

  Lindy’s stomach dropped to the floor. Not Alistair? Not Alistair? Then who the fuck was it?

  He threw his arms over his face. Blue lines bright enough to cut through all of Lindy’s blindnesses ran through his skin. She’d never seen that before.

  She inched back; this was a fight she couldn’t help him in. Never before had she felt so fucking useless as she watched her brother try to fight an invisible enemy, one that couldn’t be fought with meds and therapy and exercise. She wanted to help, but her body wouldn’t move. People always talked about fight or flight. They never talked about do nothing. Neither one nor two were an option. That left her standing in the middle of the charred living room, her feet bolted to the floor.

  Dieter struggled against the spirit. She couldn’t tell, but it looked like he was losing ground.

  This time, Lindy did hear the shriek. It pierced through her eardrums like an icepick. She covered her ears, doubling over to keep the sound out. She wasn’t sure if the second scream came from her or from one of the spirits. The crack of glass made it through the ringing in her ears. She opened her eyes in time to see the spider web seams spreading across the lenses of her glasses before they broke. The pieces bit into her skin. Something kept her from blinking.

  Dieter had always described the spirits as shadows, and that was how Lindy always thought of them. She never saw more than the occasional blurring of vision. But now, around the glass, she somehow did. And they were far from just Shadows. There were five in the room, all mangled and broken.

  The one hovering by the ceiling was dripping water, its skin falling off and revealing the muscle beneath. Two had heads hanging from broken necks, a noose around the younger-looking one’s neck. The fourth was crippled from broken bones, its jaw hanging from the rest of its skull. The fifth…

  The fifth was right in front of her. All Lindy saw at first was the open gash splitting her neck in half. Her head was tipped so far back, the muscle that would have kept it upright torn, that Lindy could barely see her face. But the clothes were familiar, and not just because they brought back every memory of bad, early-2000s fashion. The pattern of the shirt, half-obstructed by blood…

  It was from a photograph.

  A photograph in a police file.

  Alistair Cudmore’s file.

  Abigail Cudmore. This was Abigail Cudmore.

  It wasn’t just the spirits that Lindy saw. She saw everything that was happening, everything that was ever going to happen, everything that had already happened. She saw millions of years of universal expansion in the span of nothing. She saw empires rise and fall and rise and fall. Wars, plagues, famines. Births, deaths. She saw cities crumble into nothing, foliage climbing over ruins. She saw the sun expanding until the sight of it burned through her eyes.

  Abigail screamed again.

  And then, the world went dark.

  20

  The world was dark around the edges. Images, thoughts, sounds ran through Lindy’s mind. She couldn’t focus on any one thing.

  Hours of surgery had removed all the glass from her eyes, but the damage was too deep. The odds of her still being able to see were lost in the haze of painkillers. She had been vaguely aware of visitors at first, both in the hospital and later when she returned home, but then the fever set in and she couldn’t differentiate visions from hallucinations from reality.

  “I killed him!” she screamed. “I killed him!”

  “Shh, it’s okay. You’re okay, querida,” Lenna said, wiping her face and neck with a damp towel.

  “I killed him!”

  Her hands were soaked in blood, and she stared down at the body at her feet. The man’s bowler hat brushed against the edge of her skirts. She could barely breathe, the corset squeezing around her lungs.

  “Lindy, look at me.”

  Lindy looked up, but she couldn’t see through the flames. Her skin bubbled and burst from the heat, and she could smell herself burning. The screams sh
e must have been trying to make were nothing but silent air rushing from her lungs. She folded in on herself, her body moving through the ropes tying her to the stake as they melted away.

  She crouched in a tree branch and looked through binoculars. The world moved around her as if she wasn’t even there. She felt small, insignificant. Her existence meant nothing here. Her eyes caught a shift of movement in the darkness, something she couldn’t make out at first. A jaguar. A black jaguar. The poachers were approaching, hunting rifles aimed. She shouted, the depth of her voice carrying unnaturally through the leaves and over the birds and other animals. The poachers whirled back in her direction. She swore loudly and dropped down.

  Lindy squeezed her eyes shut against the impact. Pain blistered through her arm, but it wasn’t what she expected. It was localized in one spot, not at all like a break. When she opened her eyes again, she saw why. A knife in one hand, a thin line of blood that spread and thickened to match the rest that crisscrossed across her forearm. She squeezed the blood out into a bowl that was already stained red. She set the knife on the kitchen table and flipped through the yellowed pages of an old, leather-bound journal. The third page had the sigils she was looking for. The text was mostly in German, and she could only make out every few words, but she had gone through it a hundred times with the translator on her phone. It wasn’t the most accurate translation, but she got the gist of it. She drew one of them out onto the table and another onto her skin in her own blood. Both her hands lay flat on the table, smearing the sigil. Deep breaths contrasted with the shallow ones she had tried to take through the corset as she focused on the pattern beneath her fingers. Electricity crackled beneath her skin. Blue sparks formed between her skin and the table, bright lines running through her arms. The burn, not quite like the fire, ran through her. She screamed.

  “Where are you?”

  “Dieter, that’s enough,” Lenna said.

  Hadn’t she been upstairs with— No, but Lindy was down here. Except—

  Lindy groaned and kicked at the sheets.

  It wasn’t her Lenna was talking to, it was Dieter.

  Yes, okay.

  It wasn’t her. It was Dieter.

  Dieter, in the middle of the kitchen, books and papers scattered on the table and the floor. Bloody sigils decorated the table and the walls, symbol after symbol meant to summon or find or maybe something else. His skin was covered with cuts and sigils, both painted with blood and carved with the knife.

  “I have to find her.”

  The words came out raspy, tight and breathless.

  “You’re going to kill yours—”

  “She tried to kill my sister! She tried to kill Lindy!”

  Lindy rolled over and buried her face in her pillow. It was soaked in tears and sweat. God, she needed a shower. A shower, and some solid food. Lenna was a fantastic cook, but if she had to eat turkey soup one more time, she was going to puke. She needed a burger and an entire tub of ice cream.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the painkillers or if the pain was just gone, but the pain was, well, gone. She could focus now. The images were still filling her mind, but she could at least focus now.

  A funeral. Dieter being sworn in as the principal of Mohr’s Circle. A young woman scribbling into a leather-bound journal, sigils and descriptions in an informal German Lindy didn’t understand. People she didn’t recognize, places she’d never seen.

  She was still shivering, and sitting up almost took more strength than she had. After so many days in bed — though she couldn’t say how many — her legs could barely support her weight. She couldn’t see through the bandages still covering her eyes, but she’d been navigating the house with the lights off for long enough that she still knew her way around it.

  People always talked about how when people couldn’t see, their other senses picked up the weight. But it didn’t quite work like that. It wasn’t like some kind of trade, that someone would go blind and suddenly have super-hearing or vice versa. It was more like breaking a dominant hand and using the non-dominant one until it caught up. With her vision going since high school and the migraines forcing her to avoid light where she could, she’d already begun to rely on other ways to navigate, but it seemed like she was going to have to pick up the pace now.

  ‘So much for a few years,’ she thought with a choked laugh.

  Aldo meowed loudly for her benefit as he followed down the hall. She leaned against the wall, mostly for support and only partially so she could navigate to the bathroom. She almost fell through the doorway. Nobody saw that. She found the edge of the tub and sat, exhausted. He curled up at her feet. Her hand fumbled in the dark for his head to pet it. He purred, a low rumble that shook the floor beneath her feet. Terrifying predator, her ass.

  She heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs and down the hall.

  “How do you feel, minha querida?”

  Lindy laughed.

  “Like shit.”

  “Well, you look beautiful. When I came in here, I thought, que lindeza!”

  “What, is that Portuguese for, ‘what the fuck is that?’”

  She could still hear Lenna moving, slowly so as not to startle her, probably. As she approached, Lindy felt the warmth of her body until she was right next to her. Lenna wrapped an arm around Lindy’s shoulders.

  “No, it is not. It is Portuguese for, uhm…” There was a pause. Aldo meowed again. “How much prettiness.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from snorting. Right. She was the definition of prettiness right now.

  Lenna helped her wash her hair and replace the bandages. She led Lindy back to her room, practically carrying her. While Lindy sat on her bed, Lenna rummaged loudly through her closet and dressers, lamenting the lack of colour in her wardrobe. But it would be easier to pick out clothes when she couldn’t see if everything she owned was black or denim.

  “Do you remember how long before I can get rid of these?” Lindy asked.

  “Your dad says maybe a few more weeks. There was very deep cuts.”

  Lindy hesitated.

  “How does it look?”

  “I don’t know. Better, I think. The ones around look less bad. I can’t tell about the ones in. It’s…”

  She could practically hear the grimace.

  “It’s bad,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I like this shirt. It’s black and red with flowers.”

  Lindy knew the one. She only owned one shirt with flowers.

  “Yeah, it’s nice. Can you— In the bottom drawer, I have these black sweats that say The Phantom of the Opera down the side.”

  The clothes were pushed gently into her hands, and she pulled them on. After spending days in pyjamas, this was a step up. Who would have thought that real clothes could be that comfortable?

  “Que lindeza,” Lenna repeated.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  She waved her hand dismissively, but her face and neck and ears felt hot. Lenna was obviously humouring her. Still, it made her feel a bit less awful.

  Downstairs, there was a clatter of a chair being kicked into a wall and a loud scream. Aldo’s paws thumped against the carpet, Lenna’s feet following. Lindy swore under her breath and walked with her hand against the wall. The stairs were a nightmare. This was worse than walking in the dark. Her feet slid against the carpet, hand gripping the railing to keep herself from falling. Last thing she needed was to break her own goddamn neck.

  “Dieter?” Lindy called.

  She could hear him breathing loud and heavy. It sounded like there was something in his throat. Lenna spoke to him in a quick rush of Portuguese.

  The bandages over Lindy’s eyes obstructed any light that might have made it to what was left of her mangled corneas. But still, she could see blue lines, which she remembered from… from the vision, and from Alistair’s place. They became brighter and dimmer, almost fading out completely in some places. Was this what she hadn’t been seeing this whole time? What Necromancers looked like?<
br />
  “Dieter,” she repeated. “What’s going on? What happened? What’s happening?”

  Dieter laughed, choked and painful-sounding.

  “I found them. I fucking found them.”

  Lindy hadn't known just how bad her sight had been until it was gone. Not that she knew for sure that it was gone, she still had to keep her eyes bandaged. But when the fever broke and her brain realized what was happening, her Second Sight kicked into overdrive.

  Granted, it wasn't perfect. The visions were sporadic and overly vivid and focusing on one at a time was like trying to find the right channel with bunny ears. Plus, she still couldn’t see what was right in front of her in real time. Navigating her phone was a nightmare, but voice commands were saving her life.

  “Call Hex Witch.”

  “Calling Hex Witch.”

  She listened to the familiar dialing tone chime before the phone began to ring.

  ‘Please let him be in today.’

  There was no way she would be able to navigate his website to find if he was open. Her computer wasn't set up for full blind mode yet. She'd been putting it off for way too long.

  “Hey, Omen. Listen, I was just about to give you a call.” Sure he was. “Did some looking and I got nothing on your eyes yet. Can probably fashion you up a wicked prescription pair of glasses. Only ever done it with reading glasses, though.”

  “I actually… don't think I need it anymore.”

  “It clear up on you?”

  “Sort of the opposite.” She didn't give him a chance to respond. “I'm calling for something else. Do you have anything for spirits?”

  “Like what?” he asked slowly.

  “I don't know. Exorcism in a bottle?”

  Hex Witch sighed. Lindy wasn’t worried. He was going to help her. He was going to dig through his books, call up his experts, and make something for her.

  “I'll be real, spirits is not something I usually fuck with. My advice, look up Shadow Maker or the big-ass German one, what's-his-name.”

  That would have been a great idea if Shadow Maker wasn't in the bathroom shaking from blood loss and puking every five minutes, or if the big-ass German one wasn't still avoiding her calls.