Bitter Moon: Urban Witch Series - Book 2

by R. L. Giddings

  “Are those real knives?”

  He pulled a comic face. “What’s the point otherwise?”

  My dad went up to one of the knives and examined it.

  “You let your students throw knives at the wall?”

  “They’re not aiming at the wall, they’re aiming at me. But, so long as I keep delivering the lecture I’m perfectly safe. Attraction and distraction, see. Keeps me on my toes.”

  When I turned my head to a particular angle I could see that the knives created a decent outline of the human form. My dad tried to pull one of the knives out but it was deeply embedded in the plaster.

  “You must really have faith in the theory,” I said craning to get a better look at Falcone’s ear.

  A black blob of blood hung from his ear-lobe.

  “Looks like one of them nicked you.”

  Falcone touched the ear, his fingers coming away bloodied. “Looks like they did at that.”

  “Ah well,” my dad said. “We should be thankful there’s not one sticking out of your forehead.”

  Falcone let out a squawk which may have been laughter. “I remember old Doctor Brightling giving the exact same lecture in this self-same room.”

  “You were a pupil here as well?”

  “That’s the thing with Erasmus old boys: they can’t stay away.”

  I gave him an appraising look trying to judge his age. With his shock of grey hair, he was surely too old to have been in the same year as Kohl.

  “Fancy a stroll?” he asked.

  Once out of the college’s main entrance we turned left. The skies were grey and over-cast but at least it had stopped raining. Falcone had taken us to a drying shed where we had helped ourselves to boots and waterproofs. We followed a well-worn shingle path that ran parallel to the cliff face. The ground quickly fell away on one side down into a dizzying gorge. Although we could hear the sound of a stream cutting through the jagged rocks below it was impossible to see it from our position. A cloud of fine spray hanging in the air marked its location. The path was worn and pitted with age, rising steadily towards the crest of a hill and it wasn’t long before I was panting and sweating from the effort. I kept checking behind me to make sure that my dad was keeping up but he seemed more than comfortable with the pace Falcone was setting.

  The sun was struggling to break through by the time we reached the top of the hill and, in the distance we could see patches of sunshine on the mountains opposite. The ground was muddy under foot and I was glad of my walking boots. We were standing in a field which dropped away quite sharply. There were one or two sheep dotted around but otherwise we were alone. Falcone set off downhill heading towards the gate into the next field and we followed, enjoying the downward trudge. No one spoke as we crossed first one field and then another.

  Finally, as if by some pre-arranged signal, Falcone turned and faced back up the hill.

  “Well, that’s good: there’s no one following us.”

  “No one that you can see,” my dad said under his breath.

  There was a gate in the right hand corner of the next field and we all headed for that. It was only as we passed through the gate that I chanced to look up and in so doing happened upon the most marvellous view of the surrounding countryside. I could see right down into the valley where a flock of sheep were moving through a bright wedge of sunlight. Striding downhill, I’d been too busy checking the path to even look up.

  The field dropped away quite markedly at this point and we followed a line of scraggly hedge down to the next gate. On our right the path was blocked by a bank of trees.

  “How long have you been a master at Erasmus?” I asked.

  Falcone pursed his lips. “Came here over twenty years ago, although I did practice for a while before that.”

  “Anything you can talk about?”

  “Oh, you know: this and that. Spent a few years in the States. Louisiana. Lots of things going on down there. Fascinating place. They were trying to build a state highway through a swamp but their equipment kept getting destroyed. Turned out that they’d run into a Wendigo.”

  I brightened at that. “A Wendigo! That sounds exciting.”

  “Not the word I’d use,” he brushed a strand of hair from his face. “Terrifying, yes. Exciting? No. Those things are thousands of years old so they don’t do well with change. There were three of us out there working to maintain the protective wards. The project got off to a good start but the deeper we got into the swamp the more difficult it became. Then someone had the idea of pumping out the swamp water. Wendigo didn’t like that.”

  “What happened?”

  “I took a big none-disclosure fee on the understanding that I never talked about it. To anyone. Let’s just say that that highway never did get built.”

  He went to stand on an out-crop of rock and I climbed up beside him. “And then you came back here.”

  “Initially on a research contract, but then when it ended they offered me a permanent contract and, twenty years later, I’m still here.”

  “Do you stay in contact with your old students?”

  He looked at me warily. “One or two.”

  “What about former classmates?”

  “Depends who you’re talking about.”

  “I think you already know.”

  The land rose and fell quite markedly in this area and I could see my dad way over to our left trying to step between the various rocky outcroppings without touching the grass in between.

  Falcone glanced casually around. “Ideally, you’d be having this conversation with Philip Lawson, Helena’s father, but he died two years ago. Pancreatic cancer. So she asked me to meet with you instead.”

  “That’s very much appreciated.”

  Tracking Helena down had been a real nightmare. After all that had happened in the last few hours everyone at the Bear Garden was badly rattled. In the end, I’d managed to get through to someone in Millie’s office and asked them if they could pass on a message. The woman had denied any knowledge of Helena Lawson ever being an employee but twenty minutes later my dad’s phone had rung.

  Helena had rung me direct.

  Falcone said, “I trust that this conversation is to be kept strictly between ourselves. I wouldn’t want to be looking for a new job at my age.”

  “Are they that sensitive?”

  “People choose to study at Erasmus for a variety of reasons but the most common one is that they feel that they might be discriminated against in other establishments on account of their personal beliefs. We work very hard to respect those wishes. Normally when someone starts prying into the backgrounds of our students - especially high profile ones - they tend to get short shrift.”

  “I’m not here just to satisfy my curiosity.”

  Only Falcone wasn’t listening, he was moving off into the trees. I had no option but to follow. Shielded by the trees, what little wind there had been disappeared completely and I was struck with the unnerving feeling that we were being watched. Looking down at the ground I noticed that something was different and I had to think for a moment exactly what it was. The grass here was a lot longer than out on the exposed hillside. There it had been kept short by the attentions of the sheep.

  “Odd isn’t it?”

  Falcone was standing watching me, an odd kind of smirk on his face.

  I felt embarrassed. “What is?”

  “Can’t you hear it? The birdsong.”

  I cocked an ear. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you think that’s odd: all these trees and no birds. All this grass and no sheep. Have you noticed: no sheep droppings. Yet the rest of the place is covered with the stuff.”

  And he was right. There were no sheep’s droppings either. I looked up to see where the nearest sheep might be. There weren’t any. My dad stood over on the far side, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He no longer seemed to be enjoying himself.

  I took a few steps back up the hill. The ascent looked a lot st
eeper than it had done while we were descending.

  I said, “I think perhaps we should be getting back.”

  “Just indulge me for a little while longer.”

  He started off down through the last few trees and indicated for me to follow.

  I hesitated, unsure of what exactly was going on, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I started after him. The ground was particularly treacherous where some of the earth had given way and mossy tree roots had poked through. It would only take a moment’s inattention and you would be tumbling head-first down the hillside. I was so intent upon where I was placing my feet that I was only dimly aware of Falcone moving through the tree-line just ahead of me. It wasn’t easy avoiding all the potential pitfalls but finally I emerged on the other side.

  Falcone was standing beside a slab of rock which jutted out like the rim of a crashed flying saucer. I felt an odd sense of unease just looking at it. Falcone seemed blithely unafraid. He ran his hand over the contours of the rock as if reading them.

  “Fascinating. The three strongest wards known to the world of magic. Truly, a very powerful enchantment.” He looked up and smiled. “Can you not feel it. It presses on us to leave, to flee this place and yet, here we remain.”

  “Perhaps we really should be going?”

  “We could,” he sounded playful, coquettish. “But then you wouldn’t get the answers to your questions. This is the one place in the college where we can be assured that we’re not being over-heard.”

  “Tell me about Kohl,” I said a little too eagerly. “You remember him, don’t you?”

  “Everybody remembers Andreas. He is the most extraordinary individual.”

  “How so?”

  “The first thing that struck me were those rugged good looks. He’d done a lot of skiing and so had this amazingly tanned face. We were all so pale and bookish by comparison and here he was looking like he could chop down trees. Also, he wore his hair long when it was fashionable to have it short. It was ridiculous how quickly people started to copy him. Long hair quickly became the thing.”

  He twisted his head back and forth allowing his ponytail to whip across his shoulders.

  “And he had money. The rest of us were impoverished but Kohl had plenty of cash and he liked to spend it. Every few weeks he’d hire a minibus to take a group off to Inverness. He liked his nightclubs.”

  “Did you ever go with him?”

  “Me? Hardly! I wasn’t a part of his immediate circle although I do remember his birthday. He hired a proper coach for that. Took us all of to this Bier Keller in Glasgow. It was quite a night. And Kohl was quite the student. Very assured in his studies. Ridiculously well-read even before he arrived. He was always talking with the masters after lectures, initially he was the perfect pupil. He was interested in every aspect of magical teaching even the rote learning of spells. Just absorbed everything.”

  “You say that ‘initially’ he seemed like the perfect pupil. What changed?”

  “He quickly started to out-strip some of the masters. He’d openly disagree with them in lectures. I was there when he started to tear into some old boy on the potions course. Kept asking him more and more detailed questions and the poor old chap just didn’t have the answers. In the end it was embarrassing.”

  “How quickly did that start to happen.”

  Falcone looked out across the valley, a pensive look on his face. “Really, after we came back after Easter in that first year. He could be quite insufferable, arrogant even. Of course, we had no idea what was going on at home. Then in the October or November of the second year his mother died. When he came back after the funeral he was a different person. Still liked a drink but had no interest in partying. He used to spend most nights down the pub with his drinking buddies Hardy and O’Connell. They were always up to something. Got themselves banned from one of the pubs after some nonsense with the landlord’s dog.”

  “No offence but this all sounds rather tame.”

  “The dog had died and the landlord was very upset, but not as upset as he was when the poor thing turned up the day after he’d buried it. Took to wandering the village at night making this terrible wailing noise. The Dean had to intervene in the end.”

  He hadn’t said ‘Necromancy’ but we were both thinking it.

  He continued, “There were lots of contradictory reports about what had happened but the three of them had been in the pub that night and had made fun of the landlord. A lot of rumours were flying around. There was even talk of them being suspended but nothing ever came of it.“

  “You were there. Do you think they might have been involved?”

  Falcone’s eyes narrowed. “If you ask me, he was never the same after his mother’s death. It had a huge influence on him. He became much more serious, morbid even. Everything had to be linked to death in some way. He was scared of nothing, completely fearless. He set out to test the boundaries. Had no time for the normal protocols.”

  “When did you start to realise something was wrong?”

  “When one of the local farmers came up to the College insisting on seeing the Dean. One of his lambs had gone missing. When he finally discovered its remains it had been nailed to a tree with its heart and tongue cut out. That prompted one of the masters to give us a lecture about the dangers of pursuing the dark arts. It was fairly obvious who it was aimed at. He was only half way through his lecture when Kohl just up and walked out, followed by Hardy and O’Connell.”

  I looked across at the other side of the valley where a small collection of farm buildings crouched on the hillside. “He was trying to summon the dead?”

  “Looks that way. Problem is he succeeded in summoning something far worse.”

  I could guess the rest. “A demon.”

  “And a bad one at that. They were out of their depth from the start. When you summon one of those things you need plenty of fresh blood; a single lamb isn’t going to be enough.”

  “So, what happened. What did it want?”

  “I’m thinking what it wanted was Andreas Kohl. What it got was Chris Hardy.”

  I glanced back at the trees behind me. Had I caught a glimpse of something moving through there? Were we being watched? Only there was no one there. No one that I could see, anyway. It was not a reassuring thought.

  And I needed reassurance right then. A niggling fear was growing. It was more than just being out there in the wilds with only this strange man for company. More than hearing a ghostly tale well told. There was a reason why I felt like this. I was trapped in the cold, creeping terror of a waking nightmare. I edged around the front of the thrusting rock and saw for the first time a circle of bright runes etched into it.

  I felt my hand moving towards them, keen to explore the symbols for myself.

  Falcone stepped in front of me, his hands clutching my shoulders, forcing me back. There was an urgency to his actions.

  “Here,” I said. “It happened here.”

  This was no simple rock. This was a sacrificial altar. And it had been used as such long before Kohl and his friends had happened upon it. It had been washed in blood many times over the years and it called to me now.

  “You can feel it, can’t you,” Falcone was saying.

  And he was right. Whatever force lay trapped here recognised me as a kindred spirit. It seemed to be offering me bounteous possibilities –everything I could possibly want: money, love, success, power. It was all there for the taking. All I had to do was ask for it – and be willing to pay the price.

  “I think we should go,” I said. “I think I should go.”

  I started placing one foot in front of the other, making my way back up to the trees as best I could. All the time, fighting the desire to go over there and prostrate myself in front of that thing. To beg it to fulfil my desires, to feed my yearning for power. What had Falcone been thinking about bringing me to such a place? I was breathing hard through my nose, conflicting feelings of anger and desire rising up in me. Sudden
ly the wind changed, roaring up the hillside, nearly blowing me over breaking the spell.

  There was no doubting the age-old evil which lurked there and I was desperate to get away before it could tighten its grip on me.

  “Are you alright?” Falcone asked. “Helena said that you might be sensitive to this stuff but I had no idea…”

  “Then why bring me here?”

  He backed away, holding his hands up defensively.

  “I thought that you might not believe me otherwise. Say, you’re not a Spoiler are you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “One of our ex-students was a Spoiler. Came up here once. It’s something of a rite of passage for students to come up late at night and touch the rock. Anyway, he had a very bad reaction to it. Very bad. In the end he had to be sectioned.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. All I knew was that I had to get away from the rock, and as quickly as possible.

  “What happened that night: to Kohl and the others?”

  He looked suddenly very uncomfortable. After a pause he said, “It was no secret what Kohl was up to. He was attempting to perform the Rite of Summoning.”

  “And no one tried to stop him?”

  “He only had a few lines from the rite itself. They’d gathered these from reading around the subject. Everyone knows that you’d need the whole text to have a hope. We thought he was wasting his time up here. We were wrong”

  “So how did he get access to the original Summoning Spell?”

  “Rumour has it that he broke into the Dean’s apartments in order to get his hands on the Dean’s copy of the Arcana. However he managed it, it was the beginning of the end”

  A stick snapped over to my right and we both whirled around.

  “Was that useful then?”

  It was my dad. He had skirted around the trees in order to approach from the east.

  I said, “Yes, very. Only we’re not quite finished.”

  “Oh. Problem is: time’s pushing on,” his voice was cautiously tender. “We don’t want to be out here in the dark.”

  He’d never said a truer word.

  Falcone furrowed his brow in acquiescence, but his eyes betrayed him. For all that we’d been interrupted, he needed to finish the story as much as I needed to hear it. Perhaps more so.