One, two, three on the candle flame. The blood sizzled and hissed.
We all put on our glasses.
My muscles bunched. The sunglasses dimmed the clearing and made the shadows sinister. Through them, the poppet seemed to shift just a bit, to writhe. Its red handprint looked wet. Tamar crouched behind the stake. Something--a bird, an animal--shrieked in the distance.
The breeze picked up, and the flame in the glass pillar flickered and wavered. Cherry sheltered it with a cupped hand. The leaves rustled, louder and louder. Through the sound I heard a hiss.
The vulture burst through the tree branches at the edge of the clearing and circled above us. All of us who were wearing glasses gasped. Cherry and I skittered back a step. It swooped and dove, glaring and hissing. It wasn’t very large for a vulture, but it still looked like it could take a piece out of us. It turned, hovering as it flapped its wings, its attention on the poppet. It flew straight at the crude little doll, at the red handprint, and then it was perched on the firewood, the black thread running from a red handprint on its chest to Vivi’s chest.
Tamar pounced, throwing the length of twine over the stake and around the vulture. I saw that she’d made clusters of knots in it. “Help me,” she said to me and Cherry, and we jumped forward to take either end of the twine as she passed it and to help her wind it again and again. The vulture hissed and screamed. Tamar muttered something, intent on her work. Her fingers flew, binding the ends of the twine together with knot after knot.
Dionne thrust a bottle of lighter fluid into my hands and pointed at the wood. “Soak it!” I doused the wood, the stake, the vulture, and the acrid smell filled my nose. Dionne crouched beside Vivi and unsheathed Tamar’s knife. “You ready? You want, in your heart and soul, you want to be free of this thing? Of him?”
“Yes. Yes.” Vivi took the knife.
“Get the candle ready.” Dionne smacked Cherry’s arm and Cherry grabbed up the candle again. Dionne fixed her gaze on Vivi and held up the black thread. “Okay! Do it. Now!”
The vulture strained and stretched open its beak and made an unholy noise that hurt to hear. Vivi dropped the knife, her hands shaking, and then scooped it back up. “Ungh!” She doubled over, clutching her stomach.
“Do it!” shouted Dionne.
Vivi grasped the black thread and held up the knife, and howled in agony. Tears streamed down her face, fogging the lenses of her glasses. “I can’t! It hurts!”
“It’s not real. Remember, it’s not real!” Dionne grabbed her arm and shook her.
Vivi fumbled, almost cutting herself. She cried out again, and sobbed. It was too much. I moved behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. “You’re almost done,” I whispered. “Come on, Vivi, you got this. You’re almost free.”
She coughed and choked on it, and another spasm bent her again. But her trembling fingers wrapped the thread and pulled it taut, and she sawed at it with the knife. “You have no power over me!” she yelled, her voice rough and cracking. The fibers popped and yielded, and she stumbled back against me, dropping the knife, the thread severed.
“Stab it!” Tamar shouted across the pyre.
I snatched the knife from the ground and put it in Vivi’s hand, holding her up as she drew her arm back. The vulture was weeping as it screamed now, and its screams sounded like Vivi.
She sank the knife into its breast, and fell back with a wrenching sob.
“Candle!” Dionne commanded, pointing at the base of the stake. Cherry dropped it into the wood below the vulture and danced back from it as orange flame shot up with a roar.
Vivi screamed and clawed at her face and neck. “Put it out! Put it out!” She lunged at the fire and I pulled her back, wrapping my arms around her as she wept and fought me.
Dionne and Tamar were both chanting now. Dionne threw a handful of herbs onto the fire and they crackled, shooting up tiny colored flames amid the angry orange ones. The vulture was coming apart, disintegrating, in tiny black motes like flies that caught flame and rose up as embers and winked out. It screamed until there wasn’t enough of it left to scream, and the wind fell, and there was only the shushing sound of the flames.
Vivi crumpled. I couldn’t hold her up and I sank to the ground with her, cradling her. Sara rushed over to us and put her arms around us. Dionne dropped to the ground and sat running her hands over her buzzed hair. “It’s done. We did it. We did it.”
I rested my cheek on Vivi’s head and let out a shuddery breath. Joe whooped.
Wind screamed out from the trees, shattering branches and hurling them at us, and black smoke poured out from the shadows. No--not smoke. Void. It roiled and billowed and formed and Murmur’s void-face loomed over us, enormous and full of rage.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The silver spheres rolled in fury, razor teeth gnashing. Swarms of flies filled the air.
Vivi shrieked and hid her face against me. Dionne crab-walked backwards and fell on her elbows. Tamar stumbled against the hibachi, throwing herself to the ground to avoid falling in the fire. Thunder growled and electricity jumped between leaves and branches with sharp buzzes and the tang of ozone.
The teeth bared at Vivi. Did I say you could leave?
I wrapped my arms around her. “She’s free of you! You can’t have her, ever again. Not ever.”
The silver spheres rolled toward me. Is that what you think? You have no idea what you’ve done. No idea how much worse you’ve made this.
Arcs of electricity jumped from the grass and stung Vivi, who cried out and clung to me.
This one is weak. Pathetic. Like you were. It will be easy to take her back.
My throat felt like it was closing and I struggled not to panic. He was right. Vivi was sick, frail, afraid. She had barely cut the thread to the egregore. How would she hold out if Murmur abandoned the subtle approach and ran her down, a lion taking down a wounded zebra? I hugged her tight against me. What if he’d done that to me, when I was fresh out of my coma, still broken and weak? I’d have yielded without a fight.
But he hadn’t. Because--
“Rosa,” whispered Sara, hanging on to us both. “Call to Rosa.”
I met her eyes and nodded. My hand went to my key, clutching it until its edges dug into my skin. I closed my eyes. Please, Rosa Vermelha, my Pomba Gira, my Lady, please help us. This woman has no one to shield her like you shielded me. Please, please, don’t let him take her again. Please protect her.
A long moment that felt like forever, and then I smelled smoke and roses. I opened my eyes.
She was there, her long black hair blowing free, her hands balled on her hips and her legs planted wide apart, standing between us and him, staring him down. Energy crackled around her. From my vantage point on the ground, she was vast.
You are banished. My girls vouch for this one. I protect her. Will you challenge me and all my sisters for her?
The void twisted, distorted, and the thunder was full of rage. I will remember this.
The winds whipped harder, the void boiling higher until the sunlight itself was blocked. The air shrieked past us, cold and violent, the ground rumbled and shook, and the electricity burst and fizzled. The lenses of my glasses shattered. I knocked them off my face.
Everything fell silent. The fire was extinguished. Sunlight dappled the clearing again. Rosa was gone. But so was Murmur.
For now.
I was dazed by the time we straggled back to Free Radicals. Sara and Tamar took Vivi back to her tent to rest. Tamar was going to ward the tent, just to be safe, and Sara would make sure someone at Science Faction checked in on Vivi.
“Well, these were fun while they lasted.” Joe tossed the enchanted glasses in a trash bag. All five pairs had shattered at the same time.
“What now?” Cherry sagged into a chair.
“Take five.” Dionne surveyed her pile of bags.
“Good work, y’all. Think I’m gonna get my tent up.”
“I’ll help.” Joe dragged himself up from where he’d collapsed on the grass. “So, we really did it?”
“And then some. Never seen anything like that.” Dionne shook her head. “Amazing.”
“So none of you saw Rosa, at all?” I was still processing that.
“Smelled burning roses, but that was it.” Cherry yawned. “If she’s protecting Vivi, does that mean this Hungry Man thing is taken care of?”
“One Who Hungers,” said Joe.
“Tomato, tomahto.”
“I don’t think so.” Gods, I wished it were that easy. “I’m under her protection too, but that doesn’t stop anything bad happening to me. It just keeps his hands off me.”
We all fell silent. Everyone was playing it off, but I was sure they were all as shaken as I was. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that this was just one step in whatever else we had to do to stop Murmur. If it got harder than that, would I be able to face it?
I stretched out in the grass, but when I closed my eyes, thoughts and images crammed my mind. I sat up again. “Anything I can do to help?”
“I think we got--no, you know what?” Dionne poked her head around the side of the tent she and Joe were erecting. “Yes. Grab them buckets. Open all the water bottles, the blue ones, and dump them in the buckets.”
“They’re not for drinking?” I hauled a flat of bottles over to a camp chair.
“Course not. Why do I need fancy-ass water at this hippie shindig? They’re for protection.”
“Okay?” I settled a bucket between my feet and uncapped a bottle.
“Gonna multi-task this one. The bottles get hung off the trees to trap evil spirits. Water’s already purified, so we mix us up some War Water for later. Always a good thing to have on hand.”
Cherry dragged her chair over near mine and helped me. “After this? We need a plan.”
“I have an idea,” I said.
“Lay it on me,” said Dionne.
It had only been half-formed before, and after this last face-off with Murmur, I was ready to scrap it. But if I did, then we were going to spend a lot of time today sitting around not knowing what else to do. “Tamar said it would help us if we could spy on any of them. I would bet that at least some of them are in his murdered realm. If I went back in there--”
“No,” said Joe. “That’s crazy. After what happened out there just now? After last night?”
Cherry was silent for a moment. “How else are we going to find anything out?”
He stared at her. “Seriously? You think this is a good idea? You.”
“Far as I can tell, only one of us walks between worlds.” Dionne spun her mallet, thinking it over. “Big risk. You could get hurt real bad.”
“Maybe. And maybe I can learn something that keeps lots of other people from getting hurt.”
“Tell you what. Let me think on how I could help you sneak around in there. Tamar gets back, you tell her. She’s on board, we do it. I ain’t dealing with her accusing me of risking another one of her precious witch babies and we ain’t got time to fight about it.”
I dumped out another bottle of water. “Deal.”
Dionne pointed at a chaise-style beach chair. “Also, nap. You need to rest up to try a stunt like that. I’ll get you up in a bit.”
Cherry waved me off, and I stretched out on the chair, closing my burning eyes.
It felt like moments later that Joe shook me. “Hey. Hey, Dionne said to get you up. Tamar’s back.”
I didn’t want to. The sun warmed me. Sleep ran drug-like through my veins, making me heavy and confused and wanting to surrender to the sweet haze again. As I forced myself to sit up, my stomach roiled with fear. I wanted just five more minutes, ten, an hour. Why did I think this was a good idea?
Joe’s eyes were full of concern. “You don’t look so great.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a centerfold yourself, Prince Charming.”
He almost smiled. “Okay, so you’re more yourself than you look. That’s something. Come on and talk to Tamar and we can see if you’re really up to doing this crazy plan.”
“I’m doing it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” The faint trace of humor vanished. “I’m asking you, please, think it over.”
“Don’t need to,” I said. “I’m doing it.”
“Fine.” He pressed his lips together and stalked off toward his tent.
Sara was back too, tying twine around the necks of the blue bottles. Cherry stirred one of the buckets of water. “Where’s Dionne and Tamar?” I looked around.
“Shade tent, out there at the back edge of Radicals.” Cherry pointed it out. “They’re prepping things for you. Together. Miracles are real, friend.”
Sara didn’t look up at me. She looked as unhappy as Joe did. Well, safety third, as burners like to say.
The shade tent sat a little ways apart from the sleeping tents. It was tall and octagonal, made of heavy mosquito netting with a solid vinyl roof--dense enough to screen us from prying eyes.
Inside, Tamar was setting up the space much like she’d done for my journey the day before. Dionne, a bandanna tied over her head, gestured me over to her. She had a bottle of oil in one hand and a quill pen in the other. “Strip.”
My face got hot, but I did it. Dionne set to work, placing a connected pattern of shapes and lines, symbols and characters all over my body. She focused on major energy points like my chakras, palms, and soles. The oil was clear, but I could see the pattern pieces before they dried, and the quill left red marks that faded slowly. When she finished, she took out a hat pin and used a lighter to sterilize it. “Hold still,” she said. “This is gonna sting.” She sought out specific points in the pattern, knowing what she was looking for even though I couldn’t see anything, and jabbed me there with the needle. I let out little yips each time. Tiny beads of blood welled up after each pinprick, not enough to form drops.
After she finished, I dressed and lay down on the sigil-covered sheet. Dionne whistled, sharp and loud, to summon the others. Tamar put a folded towel down to cushion my head. As Tamar pierced and threaded my navel again the way she had the day before, Dionne drew a final sigil on my forehead with the oil, this time using her fingers. “This hides you. You’re not invisible, more like you blend into the walls. But, only if you keep directing energy to this spot, and if you don’t speak. You hit any trouble, I’m gonna give you some words to say. You do that, you’re gonna be visible--no getting around that. Got it?”
“Got it.” I tried to sound strong and confident.
She recited the words for me, and made me repeat them back a few times, correcting my inflections and pronunciations until she was satisfied.
“You sure you remember?”
“I remember.”
“Good. ‘Cause you’re only getting one shot at this.”
No one’s face, hovering in a circle over me, was all that comforting. Sara set my metronome again. Everyone looked intense, worried, grim. Tamar lit the incense and started a soft chant. I wished someone would smile at me, just a tiny bit of encouragement to take with me. No one did. They were all concentrating too hard.
I closed my eyes and let the smoke and the energy and the chanting permeate me and unlock the clasps of my physical body so that my spirit body could sit up and stretch.
This time I wasn’t carrying one of Joe’s Acme brand markers. This time, I had to take the time to find a door and slip in. Creating a door would have been too risky, too out of place. I moved through the blurred world around me and tried to see with the eyes of my soul as I looked for anything with a lock. It was harder than it might have been because I also had to remain conscious of keeping a trickle of energy feeding the camouflage sigil over my third eye.
I found a door hidden in a thi
cket of weeds and prickly brush. It was small, irregular, made of twisted bars that looked like old iron, but I found the keyhole among the warped metal. My key didn’t fit, and I had a match-flare of panic that maybe none of this would work. Then the key shaped itself to the hole and I felt more than heard the soft thunk of tumblers moving. I crawled in and closed the door behind me.
I was in a room, long and gloomy and institutional. It looked like a dormitory or an old hospital ward; there were rows of narrow identical beds and little else. But the entire room was crisscrossed with tangled dark fibers. Creeping vines? Weeds? No, more like spiderwebs, or nerve bundles. They were dense enough to make the room hazy. Silence lay thick as dust.
Across the room were French doors with only a few broken shards of glass remaining. It looked like the only way forward.
I avoided touching the fibers, thinking of the way that a fly’s lightest touch on a web could alert the spider. I kept my hands close against me, tense, pulling in on myself. There were gaps big enough to go through them, if I took my time. I concentrated on my sigil. I tried not to rush when I saw old-fashioned photographs on the wall with faces smeared or melted and the eyes black hollows.
Not all of the beds were empty. One was turned at an angle, and a woman sat on it. Or at least, a feminine figure in a long plain gown, with long loose hair, whose back was turned to me. She was still. The fibers ran down to her hands, folded in her lap.
In order to get out the doors, I would have to pass within inches of her back. I crept by her, one tentative step at a time. She didn’t move. What if I made a sound? What if she smelled me?
I was so close to her. She was motionless. The fibers were thick here. I stepped over one, ducked under another, pressed against the wall to avoid a knot of them. As soon as I was past the worst of it, I hurried to the doors.
Their empty panes were wide enough for me to step through them, which seemed safer than trying to open them. I found myself on a narrow terrace with wide steps to the ground. Ahead of me was a clearing. Mist rolled across the ground, flowing around wide stones large enough to poke through it like rocky islands in a river. Larger boulders reared up, featureless beasts frozen in place. Across the clearing, there was a grim forest of tall, straight, bare tree trunks. The light was dismal and marred with shadows.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 29