“Why?”
“He kills my vibe.”
“Fair enough. Where should we start?”
Chapter 15
Old Demons
Polina found the items she needed behind the bar. The bartender wasn’t happy to have her rummaging in his territory, but once I reminded him I was Julius’s special guest, he didn’t deny us. “He’ll be very angry if you’re the reason we can’t complete our duties,” I said. All hail the vampire bond. If I had to be associated with a vampire, I might as well partake of the benefits.
We ended up in a guest room that was barely larger than a closet and contained a single, thankfully empty, guest coffin. Spooky, but private.
“Candles, please,” she said. We sat across from each other, a deep silver tray between us, large enough to sport a Thanksgiving turkey. The candles themselves were already set up around the room. What she wanted was for me to light them.
“Got it.” I took a deep breath and blew. The wicks ignited, one after the other, until the entire room was bathed in candlelight.
“Good. Now I need your ring.”
“My engagement ring?” The bed of blue stones I wore on my finger was my most cherished possession. Rick had given me the ring the first time we were married and every time after that. Multiple lifetimes. Multiple weddings. I couldn’t fathom the idea of losing it. “You won’t, like, melt it down or anything, will you?”
“I won’t do anything that can’t be undone.”
“Hmm.” For some reason, that didn’t make me feel any better. Reluctantly, I offed the ring and handed it to her. She tossed it into the pan where it rolled and clanked.
“I hope this works,” I muttered.
“No guarantees. I’ve never done this, but in theory it’s a simple spell.”
“In theory,” I mumbled, reaching for my ring.
She grasped my hand out of the air and leaned over the tray. “Amani novato morae…” she began to chant.
I didn’t understand the spell, but I opened up and allowed the magic in. Our power swirled, weighing down the air. The ring rattled in the pan. In the tempest of magic, the candles flickered, causing shadows to dance across the silver. Polina’s chanting had a meditative quality, and my mind blanked until I simply existed. My consciousness was a boat, bobbing on a sea of words and power. I’m not sure how long she chanted. Time became meaningless, and maybe that was the point.
The silver tray melted, flowing like mercury to thread through and around my ring, stretching and smoothing over until the reflection filled the room with light. And then we were there.
“Burn her! Kill the witch!” a woman in black wool and a white starched collar yelled.
We stood on the edge of an angry crowd. At the center, a beautiful woman with a long dark braid, brown skin, and full red lips struggled against the push and pull of angry hands. Isabella. This was my first incarnation. The townspeople, invoking the demonic spell from The Book of Flesh and Bone, dragged her away from us, up the hill to the church grounds.
I’d experienced this memory once, using my grimoire. Only then, I’d been inside my body looking out. It was worse watching it from this perspective, helpless to change anything. More horrific to be among the crowd. The hatred among them was toxic. It made me want to cover my ears. And they were thin, skeletal, starving. Tortured souls owned by the evil on their lips.
“Stop!” I yelled.
“They can’t hear you,” Polina said. “We are just observers here.”
They forced her against the stake and used a braided cord to bind her. How easy it would have been for her to hover off that stake, had it not been for the spell holding her to her human form. Men pushed through the crowd to pile wood around her feet. I had to look away.
When I did, I saw Rick. At the back of the crowd, he paced, his hands balled into fists, his face lined with tears. There was nothing he could do. He didn’t look any younger than the Rick I knew, only more innocent; the shine in his eyes and the way his full lips parted suggested a younger soul. It was the look of panic and helplessness on his face that broke my heart. He was human, utterly vulnerable, and completely broken.
The crowd parted and Reverend Monk emerged.
“Monk,” Isabella sneered.
Reverend Monk was a man of small stature and the book he carried dwarfed him. I recognized the tome right away, The Book of Flesh and Bone. The pages were made of flayed human skin, the cover layered with the same. The ink contained human blood, and the inlaid design on the spine was not pearl but human teeth. According to legend, it was written by the Devil. I wasn’t sure I believed in a devil, per se, but if there was a source of all evil and darkness, it certainly dwelled in that book.
“Finally, justice,” Monk said.
“Justice? You call this justice? Burning an innocent woman without so much as a trial?” Isabella spat.
“Innocent?” Monk laughed. “The fire will prove your innocence.”
“If I burn, I’m innocent, and if I don’t, I’m a witch? That is my trial?”
Monk turned away, and one of the men approached, torch in hand. Isabella panted with fear, eyeing the book in Monk’s hands. As the flames caught and licked up her body, I had to look away again. I couldn’t force myself to watch. The screams were awful, worse when I smelled the burning flesh that used to be mine.
“Don’t turn away, Grateful,” Polina said. “This is the important part.”
I turned back just as Isabella’s left hand, charred and blackened, rose to waist level. Light shot from her fingers straight into Rick as her final words bubbled from her dying lips. “Caretaker of the light, always.”
Rick’s body seized, flopping to the ground and contorting in pain. The crowd turned in confusion.
“What’s happening?” a woman cried.
“He is possessed by a demon,” an elderly man chimed in. “The witch’s lover. Burn him.”
It was not Rick’s seizure they should’ve feared. At that moment, an earthquake shook the crowd. Monk’s parishioners screamed and gripped each other, cursing Rick for causing the violent quake. Darkness came on the wind. Thunder. Lightning. The earth split. Hellfire erupted from below. A woman in a full black skirt fell screaming into an open chasm. Reverend Monk burst into flames, dropping the cursed book, and one by one, the entire crowd met their end in fire and brimstone. The ground shifted, rolling their bodies into unmarked graves before closing around them. When the shaking stopped, the entire populace was buried.
All but Rick, who trembled at the base of Monk’s Hill.
The wind picked up, and a giant saber-toothed cat with a forked tail burst from the forest. It scooped up The Book of Flesh and Bone in its teeth. Looking right through me, it returned the way it had come.
“What type of creature was that?” Polina asked.
“Nekomata,” I answered, desperately wishing I could kill the beast before it got away. “Migrant shifters who collect magical objects. He’ll bury that fucker in the empty plot behind us, in what will become the foundation of my house. Caused me a world of pain last year.”
Polina squeezed my hand. “There’s nothing you can do.”
I scowled as the beast’s backside disappeared into the forest, then turned my attention back on Rick. “This is it,” I said. “Something should happen now that completes the transformation and gives Rick his magic.”
Rick was unconscious, twitching from Isabella’s spell. Watching him like this was difficult, curled like a bug in the dirt, the fires of hell burning in places on the hill, and the charred remains of Isabella looking over all of it. Aside from the occasional rustle of wind through overgrown grass, all was quiet.
All at once, the gray sky parted and a column of light descended, burning like a beacon and connecting the heavens and the earth near Rick’s feet. The heat and power coming off the light blew my hair back and warmed my face.
“Do you feel that? That’s not supposed to happen. We’re not really here,” Polina whispered. �
��What the fuck is that thing?”
The column of light took shape, gathering into a bright silhouette. The creature was humanoid, with flowing rays of light that trailed behind it like I’d never seen before—almost like wings.
“An angel?” I asked Polina, but she was struck dumb by the vision. Tears flowed down her cheeks. I was crying too, overwhelmed by the warmth, love, and light. I thought it must be an angel, but in fact, I had no name for what I was seeing. Humanoid, yes, but entirely made of light. The being placed what amounted to hands on either side of my caretaker’s face.
Rick opened his eyes. His lips parted and I could see the reflection of the angel in his widened pupils, a flickering candle flame in the depths of his soul. He stopped shaking.
“Afipneezo,” the creature said, voice reverberating around us. What did that mean? The light leaned forward and placed a chaste kiss on Rick’s lips.
Rick sat up, reaching for the light, but the angel backed away. He leaped to his feet to follow. The angel shook its head. “I will,” he promised, although I hadn’t heard the angel ask him to do anything.
“What is that thing, Polina?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” she said, voice cracking through her tears. “I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“It’s pure light.”
“It’s pure love.”
“An angel.”
“Looks like one, but I’ve never heard of them interfering in Hecate’s affairs.”
As quickly as it had come, the angel retreated, pausing only to bow to Isabella’s remains. The light funneled back into the heavens, returning from whence it came. In its absence, Monk’s Hill seemed cold and dreary, like all of the love had been drained from the landscape.
Rick stared into the sky for a moment, his loss evident on his fallen expression. All at once, he formed a fist and punched it into the earth. The ground quaked again, and iron spindles shot up around the border of the cemetery. They stabbed out of the dirt, one after another, surrounding Monk’s Hill. Once in place, their tops knit into a fence, the fence I recognized as the border of my hellmouth. The border of Monk’s Hill Cemetery glowed red and then faded.
“He’s using magic,” I said. “The angel gave him the element.”
When the fence was in place, Rick climbed the hill to Isabella’s remains. The fire under her had been extinguished, although I wasn’t sure when this had happened, whether it was the earthquake or the appearance of the angel that put out the flames. Regardless, nothing was left of Isabella but black ash, a grainy dark sculpture where the woman once was. Rick reached out to touch her face, fingers trembling and jaw tight with fought back tears. On contact, she came apart. A chunk of her cheek broke off and tumbled down his fingertips, setting off a chain reaction. Her ear dissolved, blowing away on the wind. He sandwiched her head between his open palms, trying to hold her together, but his efforts backfired. The remains of her face sifted through his fingers. There were no bones, no skull. The fires of hell had reduced everything that was Isabella to black flakes that took to the wind. From the top down, she blew apart, black pieces twisting around Rick’s body, until there was nothing left between his hands but the stake.
The howl of pain Rick released broke my heart. It started as a human sob but quickly changed into a preternatural cry, the beastly moan of an injured animal. He shifted as easily as I’d ever seen him, and when he was done, his beast spread its wings and took to the sky.
I wept, Polina squeezing my hand in support.
“We have to go,” she said.
I moaned as a strong case of vertigo had me grabbing my head. I had a brief sense of drowning, a moment of blackness, and then I was back in the room across from Polina. The silver liquid between us sank and re-formed into the tray. As it did, it exposed my ring, which spun like a top at the center of the hardening metal. It slowed and fell, spiraling to a stop.
“Heaven and earth, what did we just witness?” Polina asked me.
“I don’t know.” I reached for the ring but snatched my hand back when it burned my fingers. “It had to have been an angel.”
“I hope not.”
“Why?”
“Because if an angel’s touch is what Rick is missing, I have no idea how to make that happen again for him.”
Chapter 16
Things That Make You Go EEK!
I was still trying to make sense of what we’d seen in the platter when screams rang out from the bar. Polina rose from her place on the floor and rushed to the door, throwing it open in time for Poe and Hildegard to barrel into the small room.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Goblins. They’re here,” Poe said.
We rushed into the hall to find Julius speeding toward us. “We’ve got to get you out of here. Now!”
“Wait. Rick! He’s in the bedroom.”
Julius waved at Poe. “You, go get the caretaker.”
For once, Poe didn’t argue.
“You two. Come with me. My vampires can hold them back, but not for long.” Julius gripped my upper arm and dragged me toward the end of the hall, Polina and Hildegard close behind. The vampire led me inside a room I presumed was once servants’ quarters in the old building. There was a dumbwaiter in the wall. He slid the door open. “Get in.”
“Are you kidding me? This thing must be a hundred years old!”
“This lowers into the kitchen. The kitchen has a freezer. At the back of the freezer is a trap door to a secret passageway out of the building,” he said. “You must go alone if you wish for me to show your caretaker and familiar the way out.”
“Will we even fit?” Polina asked.
Julius snorted. “You’ll fit. In fact, two women can fit quite adequately.”
“How can you know that?” I asked. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
The thought of climbing into the small space made me shiver. Julius was right. There was plenty of room. Though once inside, I couldn’t stand or sit comfortably. I hunched, squatting over my tiptoes. Polina slid in on her knees beside me. She fit, but there wasn’t enough room for her to turn around. Her owl wedged its body between us before Julius closed the door, and we began to descend.
A few seconds later, the lift stopped. Polina nudged my hand and brought a finger to her lips. I quieted my breath and listened. Nothing. Slowly, silently, I lifted the door. We were in the back of an industrial-style kitchen.
I contorted my body to stick one leg out, cringing as my shifting weight made the slightest sound of bending metal. Feeling for the floor, I stretched until my toes met linoleum, then squeezed the rest of me out. I helped Polina and her owl do the same, before closing the door and sending the lift back up, in case Julius needed it for Rick and Poe.
Looking left, then right, I rounded the stainless steel counter. Polina drew her wand, and I felt for Nightshade, taking comfort in the brush of my fingers against her hilt. I’d tucked Tabetha’s wand inside her sheath. If we ran into trouble, I was ready.
A knocking behind us made me jump into Polina. She gave me a little shake and pointed back at the dumbwaiter. The sound was the lift coming to a stop on the second floor. I released a deep breath, until a clank from the front of the kitchen had me ducking behind the counter. From around the edge, I saw a black silhouette enter, a male goblin, bow drawn. He scanned the room, and Polina pulled my head back behind the stainless steel cupboards. Straight ahead, I could see the door to the freezer. I nudged Polina and pointed at it.
I was about to run for it when Polina pointed at the reflection in the stainless steel cabinets across from us. The goblin was drifting toward us, searching behind each counter. Two more and he’d be on top of us. We’d never make it to the freezer. Her eyes widened, and she spread her hands.
Thinking fast, I looked back in the direction we’d come. There was a pot rack near the dumbwaiter. It would have to do. I took a deep breath and blew. An unnatural wind knocked the pots and pans
together on the rack.
The goblin shifted, jogging toward the noise. We didn’t waste any time. Sprinting for the freezer, I opened it enough for us to slip through, a quiet process compared to the banging pans. Hildegard’s eyes glowed as I closed us into the dark freezer. With no window in the door, it was the only light. Shivering in the icy darkness, I used a little power to ignite a flame in my palm. Polina’s face came into view first, followed by Hildegard. I pivoted, looking for the escape hatch and had to cover my mouth to keep from screaming.
Polina didn’t fare as well. At the sight of the dead man strung up by his ankles from the ceiling, she let out a yelp before realizing her mistake and biting her lip. I was sure the walls of the freezer would muffle the sound, but I was also sure goblin hearing was better than human. We were on borrowed time. I shouldered around the body and searched the back of the freezer. No door.
“Fuck. Is this even the right freezer?” I muttered under my breath. Something strange caught my eye, a crate of dill pickles stacked in the corner. “Help me,” I whispered, tugging at the crate.
She grabbed the other side. “Are you sure it’s back here?”
“Nobody freezes pickles.”
I had to extinguish my flame temporarily in order to use both hands to pull, but working together we slid the crate back. Sure enough, there was a small door underneath. It was frozen shut.
“Fire,” Polina said.
I directed the flame in my hand toward the ice while she melted the lock on the door. We barely had it open when the door to the freezer jostled. Crouched behind the pickle crate, I couldn’t see if it opened. I slid into the hole, dropping to a rough-hewn floor. Polina and Hildegard followed, silently lowering the door above her head. We listened for several minutes, but if anyone had followed us into the freezer, it did not appear they’d found the trap door behind the dead body and the pickles.
“Should I solder it closed?” Polina whispered.
“No, Rick and Poe might need it to get out.”
By the light of the flame in my hand, we stood shoulder to shoulder, facing a root- filled tunnel that stunk of death.
Mother May I (Knight Games Book 4) Page 10