"Honey ..."
"You know I love you, don't you?" she answered. Her attention didn't leave the mirror.
"Never doubted it." His gaze dropped to the tiles for a moment.
"But you know I've always struggled with your past. It's a trust thing, and my trust is pretty shaky right now."
"I understand. I really do, but I need you to see the kids through the next twenty four hours. If I don't come back ..."
"What do you mean?" Her reflection shifted to look him in the eye. There was a trace of fear in her eyes.
"I won't lie to you. What Hilda is up to, it's extremely dangerous. Monsters or not, she's meddling with human lives, and I can't let that happen. Not on the scale she's demanding."
Diana paused, her mouth tight, her eyes darting. "I'll come with you," she said at last.
Damon moved behind her and rubbed his hands up and down her arms. "No, honey, you can't come with me," he soothed. "You know why. Watch over the kids. The runes should protect them while I'm gone, but they need their mum."
She tensed beneath his touch but soon sagged into him. Their embrace lasted for long minutes. For a time, the rhythm of Diana's pulse and breathing filled Damon's awareness.
"I guess you'll have to put those things on me before you go," Diana said, breaking the reverie.
"For your protection. None of the Order will be able to influence you with magic until the runes fade, which will take about twenty four hours."
"That'll be enough time?"
"It's all or nothing. Today's an equinox, when the ley lines are at their strongest. There's no better time than sunset to harness that power. If Hilda doesn't raise the elemental this evening, it won't happen for months."
"Let's get started, then. What do I have to do?" She twisted in his embrace to search his face.
He removed his pen from a pocket and held it up to her. "This might feel a bit strange, and probably cold, but the sensation will pass soon enough."
Diana pursed her lips and nodded. She glanced around the room before moving to the toilet. She lowered the seat cover, sat down, and extended a bare leg in Damon's direction. "Let's get this over with."
Damon crouched, positioning himself in front of her outstretched foot. Cradling her heel, he began a low chant, barely more than exhaled breaths and the motion of his lips, as he methodically set to the task of drawing the runes.
"Do I need to do anything?" Diana asked. "Like meditate or chant?"
Damon sucked in a deep breath, allowing his words to seep out like a deflating balloon. "Nothing yet, although you'll have to choose a totem animal when I'm sealing the runes."
"What did the kids choose?"
"Jen's going through her goth phase, so she chose a crow." Damon halted his drawing. "Predictable old Toby, he went with the wolf from his soccer team. He drew a picture of it in Jen's sketchbook."
"We've told him about that. I bet Jen wasn't happy."
"No, but there was something about that picture. It had a rawness, an intensity, that disturbed me. It looked ... I don't know, there was just something about it."
"Is this one of your premonitions? You haven't had one for years."
"Something like that. As a totem animal, it's a good one. Toby strongly associates with it. But ... I don't know. It was a dark wolf, crudely drawn, but dark. Toby may have tapped into something when he drew it, something magical. It's in his blood."
"Let's drop it, okay?" Diana closed her eyes. "Toby's not like that. I don't want to think about magic or the darkness of wolves."
In silence, Damon continued to weave black patterns around her toes and ankle before moving further up her leg. He carried on his inaudible chant, but Diana's words reverberated through his mind, familiar yet not, and all the more taunting because of it.
The darkness of wolves.
#
Damon parked the car in a paddock on the edge of Northam. Hundreds of other cars clogged the muddy tracks that passed for roads. The air was festive. To the casual observer, more than a thousand people had gathered to celebrate some pagan festival on the day of the equinox. Many were dressed in long white robes accented by bands of green around their waists and brows. Damon knew these would be freshly plucked plants from the priests' home gardens. The floral embellishments gave the Order priests a hippy vibe. Again, Damon knew better.
The sun was very low in the afternoon sky, nearly blocked by the hills to the west. Despite recent rains, the day had been bright and especially hot, but with the shadows of sunset came a chill that prickled his skin. Knots of people, some smiling and chatting, and still more with confused or bored expressions, mingled with the priests. At the crowd's centre, dozens of priests and more than a few children tossed logs onto a monumental pyre. The pile of wood was already more than two storeys high, supported by log struts rammed into the earth. When lit, the flames would lick the sky.
Damon kept his head bowed as he mixed with the crowd in case someone recognized him out of his robes. There was a definite buzz to the festivities, no doubt fuelled by the pulse of ley lines. Hilda had chosen her site well. This paddock was a particularly powerful nexus of ley lines, an intersection of planetary energy. The air practically tingled with power.
As Damon shouldered through the crowd, his thoughts turned to his family. Diana and Jen, sullen in their own ways, waving goodbye, Toby vowing to protect the family like the man he was. All of them covered in crawling black ink like circus freaks. The darkness of the protection runes lingered in his mind, dark but not quite as dark as Toby's wolf. The darkness of magic and the darkness of wolves. Damon blinked to refocus his thoughts. The bright colours and hum of the crowd, masking the more subtle hum of Gaia, Mother Earth, became his anchor. He did his best to banish his doubts and darker thoughts.
The sounds and smells of the people around him almost overwhelmed his senses. He narrowed his focus, opened his inner senses—his third ear and his intuition—and sought the presence of Hilda.
He found her easily enough. Her presence sang to him, as it did to anyone else attuned to the metaphysical. She stood, wizened and imperious, at the centre of a ring of priests. While a head shorter than the others, all attention was focused on her. Hilda and her retinue were on the far side of the field next to a cluster of four-wheel drives. The priests were in a bustle of activity. Some offloaded large metal drums from the vehicles that looked like giant beer kegs. A select group of others, whom Damon recognized as High Priests either by face or their robes, were involved in an animated discussion with Hilda. She appeared calm in the face of a frenetic outburst from a few in her midst. A pair of police officers, both male and looking on with increasing interest, slouched on their patrol car nearby. Damon was too far away and too caught up in the chatter of the crowd to hear anything of the High Priests' debate.
He turned his attention to yet more priests who were lighting tall wooden torches circling the perimeter of the paddock. The priests were aided by the children who weren't absorbed in building the central pyre. The children and a few helpful adults lit the torches in steady progression. Within moments, the paddock was circled by hundreds of torches—a ring of fire.
Damon squeezed between smiling faces and kids at play as he pressed towards Hilda. As he passed the priests congregating with their families, he noticed that many held a ritual chalice. With realization dawning on him, he whipped out his permanent marker, the same one used on his family, and drew two sigils on his left palm. He gathered speed. In his hurry, he bumped into a middle-aged man in discussion with two priests.
"Watch it, mate!" the man called to Damon's back.
Intent on building momentum with his chant, Damon barely registered the words, or the string of expletives that followed.
"Ah, Damon, you've come." The words met his third ear a fraction of a second before he heard them audibly. At the sound, he pulled two coins from his pocket and hastily scrawled a rune on each.
At his approach, the circle of priests, mostly male, parted
to reveal Hilda smiling at him.
"Where is your family?" she asked. Genuine puzzlement touched her eyes for a moment but little more. The smile remained fixed on her wrinkled face. "More importantly, where are your robes?"
"You know I want no part of this."
"And your family?"
"Are beyond your reach."
"We still need you, Damon." Hilda took a step forward, flanked by three of her High Priests. "Every soul counts. Every member of the Order."
"This is madness! Find another way."
"It's too late. Typhon's brood have been loosed. They're approaching."
"There has to be another way. All these people."
Some nearby bystanders had turned to watch the proceedings. Many more chatted and mingled, all now inside the huge ring of fire, oblivious to the argument at their fringe swelling between Damon and Hilda.
A High Priest to Hilda's right, a man Damon remembered as Richard, but who always struck him as Dick, waved in a haughty gesture. "We don't have time for this."
Two junior priests rushed forward as Richard weaved a short, sharp spell. Damon gritted his teeth against a sudden painful burn that flushed through his body. The effect died before it could take hold.
Sensing Damon's resistance, the two advancing priests faltered.
"Catch!" Damon tossed each man an en-runed coin and muttered a power word. The priests looked up in surprise as they each caught their coins on reflex and then toppled backwards. Both men lay as they stood, rigid-limbed at the moment they caught their coin.
Damon buckled under a wave of nausea and drowsiness. He caught himself, steadied his hands against his knees before he completely doubled over, and shook the worst of it off.
"Good try," he stammered at Hilda, who continued to wave her walking stick at him. Threads of ethereal light trailed like a sparkler as she waved the walking stick in patterns. Tiny runes on its surface burned bright in the shadows of dusk, imprinting flair stains in Damon's vision.
"You're protected." Hilda nodded to herself. "But at what cost?"
Damon thrust his left hand forward, feeling the runes on his palm burn with released energy. Hilda's walking stick was flung from her grasp and sailed far off into the crowd.
He spun to face Richard and thrust his palm forward again. The High Priest was thrown backwards, spiralling through the air until he slammed into the side of a nearby Land Rover. The man thumped into the vehicle and grunted from the impact. He left a sizeable dent in the metal after he collapsed to the grass.
A woman in the crowd gasped at Richard's misfortune. Others rushed to his aid.
"We'll have to do this the old fashioned way," Hilda said. She waved a hand and the two policemen sprang into action. They came at Damon from both sides, batons bared.
He tried to spin to face the closest officer but his feet wouldn't respond. Grass and mud had oozed up his shoes and held his ankles firmly in place.
Hilda's satisfied smile was the last thing he saw before a police baton slammed into the back of his head.
#
Damon awoke with pounding at his temples and the mother of all headaches. His world had reduced to the back seat of a car. A metal grill separated the rear of the vehicle from the font seats. No obvious lock mechanism or release was on the door. Even to his addled mind, it was clear that he'd been locked in the police car.
He tried righting himself but his hands were bound. Handcuffed, he discovered, after he tested his bonds. He repositioned his weight and used his elbows and shoulder to shimmy into an upright position. The world spun. His head throbbed like a jackhammer. Both were small sacrifices to gain a view of the world outside.
He smelled the smoke an instant before he saw the flames.
The bonfire was well and truly ablaze. Cinders soared on the breeze, carried into the heavens on a carpet of heat. Billowing grey-black smoke filled the sky, crowding out the native white clouds and the first coy stars shining through. The sunset gave the smoke an orange glow on its western edge. The flames and smoke were mesmerizing, and on any other evening, he would have watched the spectacle in wonder.
The fire's base seemed much bigger than he remembered, although judging by the light, he'd only been out for maybe half an hour. There wasn't much time.
The priests stood in an unbroken circle midway between the pyre and the ring of torches. Families clustered before each priest or priestess. Sometimes, only one or two people—a partner and child—in other cases, clumps of people, up to a dozen, milled together.
Hilda, with seven High Priests encircling her, stood apart from the rest, outside the ring of priests and their families.
Each priest held their chalice out to their family members, who each, in turn, quaffed a mouthful from the cup. He didn't know what they were drinking, but the knot twisting in his gut guided his actions.
Damon scanned his front pockets for a sign of his marker pen. Hopefully the cops had been lazy, but no such luck. The chanting outside became audible, even over the muted roar of the flames. He wasn't sure whether or not his third ear was attuned to the chant, but the rising urgency sped up his response.
He squirmed as the chanting grew to a shout, as the first people dropped to the ground clutching their stomachs and throats. He heard, sensed, and felt the wave of panic sweep through him, the cries of desperation, the accusations of betrayal, the disbelief. It almost overwhelmed him with its force. Blood thumped in his ears.
The fire billowed into the air, beyond the natural reach of flames, seeming to draw energy from the Earth itself. As each moment passed, the smoke darkened and the sheet of flame licked higher and higher, hungry to devour the sky.
More people, more innocents, dropped to the ground and writhed in pain. Poisoned at the hands of their loved ones—fathers and mothers, siblings and children. Soon, nearly all the relatives had dropped, although some struggled, locked in a life and death battle with their betrayers, a battle they were destined to lose as the poison eventually took hold. All were doomed to die, as Toby, Jen, and Diana would have been had Damon not resisted the compulsion to bring them along.
Diana's accusations of shaken trust returned to haunt him as he struggled against his handcuffs, struggled to angle himself to extract the spare pen from his boot. He successfully retrieved it on the third grab, as the last person fell to the ground.
Most of the sacrifices had stilled. Many were clumped together, with children wrapped in their mother's arms, their tiny faces hugged to breasts to temper their final moments and muffle their cries of pain. Couples lay piled atop one another, some with hands held, others dying alone, curled in foetal positions and staring sightlessly at the flames.
By the time Damon had drawn a rune of insubstantiality and freed himself from the handcuffs, the last sacrifice had died.
More than a thousand people murdered.
The chant continued as the bonfire burned its way toward the heavens. The inferno towered over the paddock, casting everything in a murderous orange-red glow. Its smoke plume spanned the horizon to the east, forming a dark smudge between earth and sky and trailing off into darkness.
The priests broke their line, which had grown ragged from containing the last rebels in their death throes. They moved amongst the bodies, dragging and carrying their relatives and dumping them at the base of the pyre. Some had the good grace to wear their grief openly. They set about the task of sacrificing their family's bodies to the rising Fire Elemental with tear-streaked faces and open sobbing. Others, too many others, moved through the field of corpses like stony-faced vultures.
The Elemental continued to grow, becoming vaguely humanoid as its fiery base consumed more and more of the sacrifices heaped around it.
Amid the burning and the chanting, and the roar of the fire no longer dull, Damon watched Hilda as she continued to lead the chant, a rapturous look chiselled onto her face.
The seven High Priests held her tempo with the chant, although none matched her expression of ecstasy. The Fir
e Elemental fed from the sacrifices, engorging itself on the energy of their souls and the ley lines pulsing into its heart, shaped and refined by the ministrations of Hilda's chant.
"You sick bitch," Damon muttered. His gorge rose as the stench of burning flesh seeped into the car.
He narrowed his eyes, focusing all his indignation and hate towards Hilda and her entourage. Damon maintained that concentration as he merged with the metal grill inside the police car, then passed through to the other side, still enchanted by the rune of insubstantiality. Without looking away, he scribbled three sigils on his index finger. Three sigils that sparked electricity into the steering column when he touched the ignition.
In moments, the car powered to life, its headlights blazing on high beam. Several priests closest to him turned in surprise, dazzled where they stood with their grisly burdens in their arms.
Damon paid them no mind. It was Hilda's face only, her smiling face, that existed for him. It became a target as he threw off the park brake and slammed down the accelerator. That face loomed larger and larger in his field of vision, until, with only a few precious meters between them, and the roar in his ears, that terrible roar, she turned and noticed him and the smile slipped away.
The thud was meaty. Satisfying. The windshield shattered into a jigsaw of cracks and blood. He slammed the brakes hard, skidded in the mud, and spun until the car crashed sideways into a tree.
The world swam before his eyes and refused to slow down. A high-pitched whine rang through his ears, but the roar was louder, as were the screams.
His shirt had been flung open from buttons lost to the earlier scuffle. Circle upon circle of protection runes were gouged into his torso. The wounds were still raw and weeping from the cuts he'd made earlier that day, but the runes had seen him through this confrontation and still pulsed with heat.
Composing himself with a couple of quick breaths, he pushed his way clear of the car. His ears wouldn't stop ringing. He couldn't get a fix on Hilda's body, although bits of hair and gore were interspersed with the blood on the hood and windshield. Bits that could only belong to the old crone.
Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno Page 8