The Secrets of Blood and Bone

by Rebecca Alexander

  He opened his mouth to ask for clarification when Jack walked over the new grass, ducking around the circle of elders, still an island of branches and thorns. Ches, dancing around her feet, started whining.

  “What’s wrong, I heard you—oh.” She grabbed the dog by his collar and nodded toward the body. “Do we know who he was?”

  “I have my suspicions,” Maggie said, and stared at Felix, unblinking.

  “You can speak in front of Felix.” Jack looked from one to the other. “Maggie, he’s family. Ask Sadie.”

  Maggie reached into her bulging pockets for heavy-duty rubber gloves. Leaning over the body, she matter-of-factly checked each pocket, then threw the slimy, stinking objects onto the recently cut grass. Finally, she lifted the jacket away from a holster.

  “There’s a gun,” she said, looking back over her shoulder.

  “I knew the cat was shot,” Jack said, stepping away from the thing as it fell beside the body. “The Dannicks must have sent him.”

  “What?” Felix started, as he backed away from the black object.

  “When we got here there was a dead cat in the kitchen, a big one. It had a round hole in its forehead.”

  He thought about the theory Maggie and Jack had started to develop about the death of the old woman. “You think this man was somehow involved in Ellen’s death?”

  “I’m sure. Why haven’t they sent the police round to ask us about Powell? Because this…person can be traced back to them. I’m sure he was supposed to intimidate Ellen into giving up the book, and ended up killing her. Not by shooting, though.” Jack grimaced and stepped back a little more. “Maybe he used the gun to threaten her.”

  “So how did he kill her, then?” Felix looked from one to the other.

  Maggie looked at Jack as if still unsure whether to speak. “You’ve seen Jack use sorcery.”

  He turned to Jack. “I don’t know how she did it, but she exerted some magical pressure on Elizabeth Báthory, certainly.”

  “Well, someone ‘exerted some pressure’ on Ellen. And we know they were looking for something in the garden, this black hair-root.”

  “But that was only a few weeks ago and this body is ancient. It must have been here months.” Felix stepped closer to Jack, upwind of the corpse.

  “This body is recent.” Maggie pulled the boot, until an inch of slimy flesh appeared above the top. “Allowing for the cold, it’s only been here a month or two. Roughly the same time as Ellen’s death.”

  Felix pointed at the thorns, impaling the body. “But in these temperatures, it could have been here for longer, at least from the autumn. And the plants don’t grow in the winter, so how did the branches end up right through him?”

  “The garden killed him.” Maggie had an intense look on her face. “The ground reached up and the plants and animals in it dragged him down.”

  The smile faded on Felix’s lips before it was complete. “That’s insane. I mean, it’s wild out here, but there are limits to plant physiology.”

  “Less than you would think. Brambles can grow a couple of feet in a week.” Maggie stepped closer to Jack’s shoulder. “Ask Jack how they can immobilize someone. They can do much more. The ground under the elders is littered with animal bones, mostly pigeon, I suspect, and a few rabbits. I think the brambles hook the animals and hold them down, then grow into them.”

  “So he got stuck out here, and then the plants speared him?” Jack’s voice was a bit shaky. “That must have been agony, surely he would have made a noise.”

  “Look at the amount of branches around his face,” Maggie said, pointing with a stick. “They may even have suffocated him.”

  “So what was he doing here? Just to get the herb?” Felix stepped back as another wave of stench hit him.

  “He was here to compel Ellen to hand over Thomazine’s book, I suspect.” Maggie dropped the stick. “And when she couldn’t or wouldn’t, he killed her.”

  Felix couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his voice. “The coroner concluded that she died of natural causes.”

  Maggie’s eyes crossed from him to Jack, and back again. “Ellen was killed with magic.”

  “Magic. And you’re sure it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Yes, Professor,” Maggie bent, grasping a stick from the clear up. “Magic. It leaves a residue, like a smell. This is just a stick, right? And this just grass.”

  “Maggie, don’t—” Jack started to say, but Maggie ignored her. She inscribed a circle around herself.

  It wasn’t so much the words, he later thought, but the manner in which she seemed to look inside herself, drawing on an intensity he hadn’t seen before. Jack stepped back quickly, but the first sign of the fire coiling from the circle around Maggie was a pink tendril of flame exploring his ankle, making him leap back. The flames, probably only six inches high, seemed to radiate more heat than their size would suggest, and burned with a metallic smell that ate into the stink from the body. Maggie’s expression reminded him of Julian’s when Gina was possessed, as if she were listening to something beyond the normal world.

  Maggie looked up, her eyes narrowed with concentration, then stopped chanting. The fire died away, leaving a tiny scorched line in the grass.

  “That’s magic,” she said, a little breathlessly. “If I can do that, and I’m just one witch, think what a whole garden can do.”

  “But a garden doesn’t think like a human, and it’s not ‘a garden’ anyway, it’s thousands of disparate organisms of many species. Not to mention it’s continuous with the rest of the land beyond the walls.” He bent to inspect the ground. Ice had formed inside and outside the line in shards. “How did you do that? Energy seems to have been drawn out of the ground, the air. How does it work?”

  Maggie crouched and took off one glove. She pressed it to the ground, murmuring something. Then she stood up, rubbing sweat off her face with her sleeve. “This garden acts like one massive organism. It’s not just what you can see, but fungi and bacteria under the ground, plants whose roots intermingle. Even the branches of the trees…” She stood and pointed into the knot of elders. He could see branches that had grown into neighboring branches, as if holding hands. “This is an ancient garden, tended by witches. He murdered the witch, and the garden dragged him down and killed him. Simple.”

  He felt the last reassurance of science slipping away. “How can you be sure she was murdered when we don’t know how it was done?”

  “I do know how I would do it.” Maggie stood up and faced him, jaw clenched, scowling at him. “The same way I made the fox fire. He started a fire inside her that burned her up from the inside.”

  Jack put a hand on his arm. “This is my world, this is our reality. You have to suspend your doubts for a moment.”

  He chewed his lower lip for a moment, the scent of scorched grass still in the air. “I’m not arguing with you; that was a very convincing demonstration. But I need to reconcile it with my understanding of science, too, OK?” He glanced back at the line of ice, now melting in the sun. He glanced at Maggie. “If he killed Ellen with this…fox fire…why did he need to shoot the cat?”

  “It must have gone for him when he threatened Ellen,” Maggie said. “The cat and the garden, all the living things within it, are protective of the cottage’s owner.”

  “The garden. Is it…sentient, then? Do you think you communicate with it in some way?” He wrapped a glove around the stinking gun and examined it. It was a revolver and, on closer inspection, had fired just one bullet.

  Maggie shrugged, and picked up her tools and gloves. “Sadie does, too. She hears it whispering to her.” She walked back into the house, back straight.

  “She’s angry. She hates having to explain magic to anyone.” Jack pinched her nose. “Put that…thing…down and come away from the smell.”

  “Why can’t we call the police and let them worry about how it happened?” He placed the gun on the grass and stepped away from the body.

  “Sadie and I
need to fly under the radar. We don’t have any official identity, no passport or ID of any kind. Not to mention that our fingerprints are on file as missing persons.” She stood beside the stand of elders, upwind of the smell. “I can’t believe we didn’t smell that before.”

  “It’s pretty decomposed. I disturbed a pocket of less well-deteriorated flesh.”

  She squinted up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “We have the strangest conversations.”

  He smiled down at her. The bruise on her cheekbone was now a shiny, purpled bulge under her eye, and she had several deep scratches over the bridge of her narrow nose. Her blond hair was spilled over her collar in wavy threads. For a moment, he thought he should kiss her, but then a wary look developed in her eyes, and she pulled away. Maybe she remembered what had happened the day before.

  “Go in,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  He started to follow her back to the house. They reached the back door and he could hear Maggie talking, her voice stressed and high, to someone in the hall.

  “Felix!” she called.

  He turned to Jack. “I’ll go. Check on Sadie and keep Ches out of the way.” He walked down the hall, seeing a tall man on the doorstep in a long wool coat. Another man in a suit and a flat hat, like a chauffeur, stood beside a large car.

  Maggie turned to him, her face relaxing for a moment. “Professor. I was just explaining to Sir Henry that we still haven’t identified the herb he was looking for.”

  The man held out a hand. “Dannick. Professor…?”

  “Felix Guichard.” He grasped the gloved hand. “As you can appreciate, the grounds of the cottage are very overgrown and it will be some time before Mrs. Slee can look for individual plants. But it is equally likely that rare species have simply been strangled by nettles, ivy and brambles.”

  The man frowned. “My grandson’s health is declining. I was simply inquiring about progress. Also, I wondered if Miss Hammond has spoken to an employee of mine, Mike Powell? He seems to have absconded with some of the money set aside for a research project my family has funded.”

  Something about his manner suggested he knew very well what had happened to Powell. “I’m sorry. She has been occupied with her daughter, who has also suffered a setback.”

  “I understand. Nevertheless, it would help me to speak to her. She was looking for a book that might help my family find an alternative source of the herb.” Dannick smiled, but looked at the sky. “Could I come in? It is starting to rain.”

  “I’m afraid that would be a waste of your time.” Felix turned to get his wallet off the small table in the hall. “This is my card. Perhaps it would be better if you dealt with me, rather than Jack while—” Damn, he couldn’t remember the name Sadie was using. “You understand, Jack is very worried.”

  “Of course.” Sir Henry took the card. “We are also deeply concerned for a child. Professor of social anthropology. Interesting.”

  “We will call you the second we find anything that might be useful. But it would be helpful if we knew exactly how the herb works—”

  “Well, thank you for the card. I’ll be in touch.” The man turned away, pulling up his coat collar against the first spots of rain. Before he reached the car, he turned. “Please tell Miss Hammond that if she has any knowledge of Mr. Powell’s whereabouts, it would help us. She’s welcome to talk to the police, if she prefers. We hope that monitoring footage from cameras inside the project will help us determine exactly what happened.”

  For a moment, the thought of Jack assaulted and beaten clouded Felix’s concentration, but he fought it down. “Of course,” he said, the words ground out. “Good luck with that.”

  He shut the door behind Dannick and turned to Maggie. “We need to find out more about the Dannicks.” He shrugged his fleece off and hung it on the newel post of the stairs, over Jack’s coat. “Tell me again how the magic could have killed Ellen. How does it work?”

  Maggie glanced into the living room, and lowered her voice. “He started a fire inside Ellen.”

  “By somehow transferring the energy from the garden into Ellen, like the ring of flames you conjured in the garden?” He took a step back, staring at her. Her expression and body language at least suggested that she believed it. “I know you produced enough heat to burn someone but kill them?”

  “It doesn’t have to be an actual flame, just a point of heat that is too high for life. I’ve never had to do it, but I saw someone bring down a bull that was charging, many years ago.” She sighed, and leaned on the banister. “You saw the fox fire. There are dozens of spells that manipulate heat.”

  “And you think you could do it?” Felix’s mind leaped back to something he had read, years ago. “Dee believed it was possible, but he created a corporeal fire that he somehow used to transfer energy to an inanimate object.”

  “Dee’s methods are all complicated by ritual, but at their heart they’re about focusing intent. I don’t know if I could kill someone. It would use so much energy it could even harm me to try.”

  Felix sat on the stairs. “We have a body in the garden, Dannick is threatening to call the police and Sadie is very weak.” He pushed his hair off his forehead. “Well, we can at least move the body.”

  Jack opened the door from the kitchen. “Move the body? Ugh.”

  “We won’t need to.” Maggie turned to Jack. “You can see the body is already half embedded in the ground.”

  “So someone dug a shallow grave.” Felix looked from Maggie to Jack, and saw some unspoken message pass between them. Maggie retreated back into the kitchen. “Although how anyone could get out there—”

  “The garden is burying it.” Jack was disturbingly close. “We’re just going to encourage it to finish the job.”

  He looked down into her green eyes, the color of new leaves. “How are you feeling?”

  She shrugged, and touched the swelling on her face. “Shattered, but I’ll live. What did Dannick say about Powell?”

  “Dannick said he’s run off. He says he has CCTV footage of parts of the research center.”

  She managed a lopsided smile. “There might be a camera in the woods but what are they going to see? It was dark, he attacked me, I escaped and called for help. That’s it. The wolves did what wolves do, defended themselves.”

  “And you’re sure he didn’t get out?”

  Jack seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat and looked down. “He must be dead.” She remembered the warm horror of his opened abdomen. “I’m sure.” She walked into the living room and knelt by the woodburner. “If she’s up to it, I’m going to ask Sadie to talk to the garden. She seems better out there, and she seems to…I don’t know how to describe it, but the garden lets her in. She’s never tangled up out there. It just seems to welcome her. Maggie says it’s her superpower.”

  “And yours is talking to animals?”

  She pushed a log into the firebox. “I called the wolves to me last night. I remembered what Maggie said, and just drew on what I knew about Ches. I acted like an injured pack wolf and they came to my defense.”

  He sat down, feeling old. Jack and Sadie seemed to live in a world he could barely touch. One minute she was concrete, in his arms, pressed against his body in her sleep, the next minute she was back in the world of magic and myth, where he didn’t belong.

  “All I know is you were attacked and nearly raped, and you came to me for help.”

  She sat next to him. “I did.” When he met her eyes they were staring at him, with some emotion stirring her expressions. “Because I love you, and I trust you. God, that feels weird!”

  “Loving me?”

  “No, idiot! Saying it.” She laughed, a soft low sound, just for him. “I’m thirty-one years old and the last time I had a crush on someone I was about fourteen.”

  “Well, I was in love with Marianne for more than half my life. But now…I don’t know what to do with you.” He stretched his fingers out, seeing the wrinkles, the signs of nearly fifty years of s
un damage and scars. “I’m years too old for you.”

  She smiled. “Yes. And I’m way too dead for you.”

  He hesitated, then turned to study her again. “I want to go to London, to ask more questions. It’s about this blood thing.”

  “I’m fine, I told you.”

  “The more we know about the effects of taking blood, the more we can use the information to help keep you—and Sadie—safe. And healthy.”

  Remembering the close call they had just had with Sadie was sobering for them both. “Anything that stops Sadie collapsing again is fine with me. So, what’s in London?”

  “Ivanova—the woman I met in Paris—has come over with Gina to a club where people drink blood.”

  “You’re kidding. What sort of people? Are they like me or are they normal?”

  He smiled. “I’m not sure we can call people who enjoy drinking other people’s blood ‘normal,’ but there may be some who are revenants.”

  “Borrowed timers?”

  He reached for her hand and looked down at the pale fingers curved in his palm. “I’m not sure if they are; they may be something completely different. They allow themselves to become very close to death then take blood to give them enhanced energy and, they say, longevity. I’m not sure it’s exactly the same, but, yes, I suppose they are living on borrowed time too.”

  “Why would anyone want to become half dead?” She pulled her hand away, and he let her go.

  “They refer to it as ‘ascended.’ They believe they are a superior kind of being.”

  She snorted. “Superior? That’s ridiculous.”

  “But by drinking the blood they get extra energy and, they believe, immortality.” He hesitated for a moment. “The woman I met in New Orleans is researching it.”

  He could feel her withdrawal. “Like Elizabeth Báthory. They are trying to be like her?”

  “Well, maybe they have found a way to avoid becoming a predator.”

  She sat still for a moment. “They must become addicted to it, and then what would they do to get more? I can understand how people become hooked on that feeling, Felix, I really can. I felt like I could do anything.”