by Scott Tracey
He winced. Maybe he realized he was being a dick. “Look, I’ll talk to you later, Braden. Stay out of trouble, okay?”
Watching him rush out of the restaurant, and sitting there with half a pizza left in front of me, I realized something else about Belle Dam. Boys suck no matter where you live.
¤ ¤ ¤
It was a half hour before midnight, and I’d packed my school bag with supplies, read my journal a few dozen times, and changed outfits at least twice. I’d finally settled on a thick sweater and a pair of jeans.
There was no one in the hotel lobby when I snuck out of the building. The lights had all been dimmed, leaving it looking somber and nearly asleep. It was almost as though everyone in the world was gone. I was the only one.
Something howled in the distance. It sounded like a wolf, but that was impossible. There weren’t wolves for hundreds of miles. Just some dog with delusions of grandeur.
It wasn’t hard to break into the cemetery. A small stone wall set it apart from the street, but it barely reached my waist. It probably did a fantastic job keeping the kindergarteners out, though. I hopped over and slid between the folds of old stone and grave moss.
Lucien had said the monument couldn’t be missed. But if anyone could miss it, it would probably be me. I avoided the paths winding through the graveyard, preferring to stick more in the hidden shadows between old crypts and giant statues.
It took nearly ten minutes before I saw the Lansing name gleaming under the passing glow of nearby streetlights. Where two paths met and divided, creating a three-way intersection, there was a large stone pillar. It reminded me of the Washington Monument, and the Lansing name was etched across the front. And below that, something like a rolled piece of parchment was carved into the rock.
“Know that not every door will open to the proper key.”
“The hell does that mean?” Another link to keys. Grace’s fascination with them transcended death, too, apparently.
I closed my eyes and sank to my knees. It had been a long time since I’d tried anything so severe.
I pulled out the supplies I’d brought, unrolled the corded tassel into a circular shape, poured out a bottle of water over it, and sprinkled some salt over both. Using tools might help me keep control if the spell went haywire. If I’d learned anything in my seventeen years, it was the little things. Don’t go ripping holes in the spirit world without some restraints.
I held my hands apart, drawing the magic forth. Quicker than expected, pressure rose from beneath me. Almost like it had been waiting for this. Below my glasses, energy spilled forth in dark greens and ambers, spectral lights that spun.
The power was rising fast. Almost too fast. I hesitated, wondering whether or not to lose the glasses. Without them, it felt like there were no limitations. I could do whatever I wanted with the magic, but everything came out too strong.
The circle I’d crafted in the ground pulsed with the energies—colors that merged and crashed apart as careless tides. It began to spill outward, spinning faster and growing larger each second.
I felt something I couldn’t see, some sort of timbre in the earth. Rumbling. Approaching. I hesitated only a moment, long enough to wonder what else I’d drawn from within the ground. And then I remembered my vision, and the monsters I’d seen clawing their way out of the dirt.
The circle grew warm and there was a sound like a coyote’s howl heard through a cascade of water. “Bring her forth!” I called. “Come forth, Grace Lansing!”
The lights grew faster, blending together until I couldn’t see anything but light. The wind picked up, circling around me like a tornado. Any stronger and it would pluck me from the ground and hurl me into the sky. I pressed my hands against the dirt as though that would hold me here. Just a few more minutes, just until the spell is done.
But the energy kept pouring forth. More and more, it kept growing. The spell I was weaving bulged and strained against the edges of my circle. Underneath the tide of magic, something else was unraveling.
In a matter of seconds, the perfect spell was changing, transforming itself into something else. There wasn’t time to think about it; I threw the glasses off and stared into the heart of the maelstrom.
Betrayer. Vandal. Savage darkness boiling under the sky is falling and silver defiance where there is nothing but pain and remorse like sickly green ashes touching the sky to draw the black fires from the heart.
A thousand different women screamed with a single voice as the impressions crashed down around me.
Magic that had been crystal and wind was pulling open something that had been locked away. The spell had triggered it, ripping it from slumber and unleashing it into my magic. Dark taints swirled inside, quickly spreading.
It was a trap.
Something had been hidden here, waiting for someone to try invoking the spirit of Grace Lansing. Her monument was booby trapped, and I didn’t have a clue what this new spell was trying to do.
I tried holding out my arms, tried to rip each bit of shadow from the spell. But with every pull, every weed I plucked out of the whole, more grew in its place.
Something golden easily pierced the swirl of magic surrounding me, a shimmering flurry of energy that leapt in one side and out the other. A moment later, something huge shot over my head, barely missing the top of Grace Lansing’s monument. I saw a glimpse of paws, and then it was gone.
The spell was growing more unstable by the second. Shards of obsidian fractured the warmth, leaving only a bone-chilling cold in its wake. “Banish it!” I screamed, the wind’s fury matching my fear by picking up and ripping the words from my throat. But trying to stop this magic was like holding back the ocean.
The storm is coming. I knew with absolute conviction that the skies about Belle Dam were darkening, and the rumbling from the ground was now matched by clouds that had gone feral above me.
The spell had become something different. The fire of it burned its way through my brain, the only thing I could see. A powerful summoning, far stronger than anything that would have drawn a spirit back from the other side. I knew at once I could never have cast something like this.
A keyhole blazed silver-white from inside the monument, a feature I hadn’t noticed before. There was only a moment to piece together what I was seeing, a fraction of a second to see the light spilling out of it.
Just before the world exploded in front of me, I heard the sound of someone’s breath catch. I turned my head, nearly getting whiplash in the process. Trey was panting, standing right outside the circle. In his hand, he clutched something that glinted in the light. “Braden?” he shouted over the rushing winds.
I met his eyes, realizing how futile it was to keep fighting. The magic was overwhelming me. I whimpered once. Something exploded out of the sky above us, lightning that struck the monument in front of me. The last thing I remembered was how strange it felt to fly.
Seventeen
When I came to, I realized that the warmth beneath me was vaguely human-shaped. I groaned, feeling pain in all four extremities. Nothing felt broken, and migraines hurt worse than this. I shifted myself to the right, eventually rolling off and onto the ground. The coolness of grass and dirt helped me get my bearings.
The cemetery was quiet, except for the sound of muttering. It took me almost a minute to confirm that it wasn’t coming from me. It was coming from the human shape I’d landed on. Trey.
I struggled to my feet, wobbling once I was vertical again. The magic had dissipated, leaving an impressive residue over the cemetery—dozens of feet in diameter. I could taste the darkness in it, something that smelled like spoiled meat and burning. There were traces of my own personal magic all over it, like a flashing signature scrawled over everything. It was already soaking into the graves, the grass, and everything.
“Next time, tell me to d
uck,” Trey said groggily.
I stumbled toward Grace’s monument, scanning the ground for my glasses. Nowhere. They were gone. Then I realized something was wrong.
Normally I’d be hunched over with the visions by now. But not this time. I saw the same as always, everything sharper than it normally was. There was no pain. Knowledge was … fluid. I could pick and choose what I wanted to see. My eyes trailed up the base of the monument, and I gasped.
The lightning had struck Grace’s monument. The top half was just gone, smashed into bits of rubble. It looked like glass that someone had smashed a fist through. Deep gouges and cracks lined the rest of the monument.
And there was the keyhole, the one I’d seen glowing before the spell had finished. It wasn’t metallic, like I’d thought originally, but something carved into the stone. The lines of it were still smooth and sharp, something that had been done recently, and not something that had been weathering in the graveyard for a hundred years. A keyhole that had faced downwards, but was now turned on its side. A door unlocked.
I reached out and pressed my fingers against it. The stone was warm, almost hot.
Images in rose light flashed before my eyes. One after another, I watched a line of men and women who’d stood at this very spot, staring at the monument. With each one, their clothes and hair shifted, a slideshow traveling back in time. And then I saw the veiled figure, kneeling down in front, the fiery glow of magic around her. She was the one who had cast the spell. All the way back in the beginning, when the ground had just been turned over, and grass hadn’t had a chance to grow.
I started to laugh. For the first time, the visions were under my control. Even knowing I’d walked into some sort of trap couldn’t compete.
“Where’d it go? The wolf!” Trey was standing now. “What in the hell were you doing?” I froze in place, fear lodged in my chest. Why was he here? Why now?
I opened my mouth to say … I didn’t know what I was going to say.
“Braden, what were you doing here?” Trey grabbed my shoulder, his fingers digging into the skin. “Tell me!”
Fortunately for me, the coyote called out again. Trey had called it a wolf. I remembered a brief flash as something flew over me, something with four legs.
Trey switched his grip and shoved me around. There was a haunted, predatory look to his eyes. In the darkness, he looked harder. More a cage fighter than a college student.
All it would take is one look at my eyes, and everything would be different. But Trey wasn’t looking at me just yet; his eyes were drawn to the monument.
“Jesus,” Trey whispered. “Braden, what did you d—”
Our eyes met, and I saw through him. Trey unraveled in front of me, layers upon layers that peeled away like petals falling off a rose. I saw how deep loyalty ran within him, silver and gold threads that kept all the other parts together. I saw reflections and memories against diamond walls, decayed flowers that had been trampled underfoot, and icy winds of sarcasm that surrounded the core, the dark parts even he couldn’t see.
Somewhere deep inside, far deeper than I was now, there were glimpses of charcoals that could only spark but not flame.
“You have the Widow’s eyes.” His shocked tone pulled me away from the visions.
I dropped my eyes and looked away. There, on the ground in front of me, were my sunglasses. I started to kneel down, intending to put them back on, but Trey surprised me again. Getting there first, he snatched them up, trying to look me in the eyes again. “I … ” Nothing else came out of my mouth. Shivering, I heard the low moaning that took to the air as night wind swept through the city.
“I don’t understand.” Trey’s voice was soft. “They’re supposed to be a legend. But you have it, don’t you. The Widow’s Sight.” He pressed the glasses into my hand. “I don’t understand,” he said again.
“Neither do I,” I whispered.
“Braden … ” Before anything else could be said, a snarling interrupted.
A pack of things dug their paws into the ground behind us. They were taller than dogs, and held all the proper proportions, but they were like someone’s nightmare of what a monstrous dog was. Dark fur ranged from black to red to gray, mottled over their entire bodies. In places, the fur was more like spines, with long distinguished barbs.
Their eyes held some sort of intelligence, but it was the insides that were the most disturbing. Animals had a nature, a survival instinct. These creatures didn’t want to survive so much as they wanted to kill.
I began to gather the magic around me, purely in defense, and the leader stepped forward, jaws parting. That’s when I knew what they were. “Hellhounds,” I breathed.
The legends said that a witch had bound dark spirits into a pack of dogs, creating a monster that exuded violence, but could be easily controlled with magic. At least until the hounds had started mating, giving birth to a species that was even more savage than their parents. They also had a resistance to magic, and the ability to sense and track magical energy.
The moral of the story was be careful what you conjure, and be absolutely sure you can put it down when you’re done. Hellhounds, even just one, were lethal to the unprepared witch.
Four of them stared us down, huffing dark breaths into the night.
Trey stepped in front of me, his arm stretched out to one side. He thinks he can protect me? I wanted to laugh. The hounds would rip through both of us like wet paper, and devour what was left.
“Run,” I said, my voice shaking. Trey didn’t move. I grabbed his arm.
“Trey! Now!” I tugged at him.
“Stay behind me,” Trey ordered. “I’ll hold them off.” He pulled a wicked-looking knife out of his back pocket.
“No you won’t.” I drew on the leftover magic from the spell, pulling it back to me. “Now’s not the time, alpha dog.”
I held out my right hand. I felt the threads of magic slipping out of my fingers, and I traced runes into the air. “Vas,” I called out, summoning up the only Sanskrit word I could remember. Stay. “Stop!” The words caught blue fire, coloring in the runes I’d traced. Spells of binding; locks; chaining the air together.
The hellhounds snarled. The leader took another step forward, its red eyes narrowing. The moment my voice died, it leapt forward and slammed into thin air. I flinched. The fiery runes rippled but they held. For now. It might buy us a few minutes. I yanked on Trey’s arm again, this time feeling it give way beneath me.
“C’mon Braden, run!” Trey shouted, twisting out of my grip and replacing it with his fingers on my wrist.
“Now we run?” I didn’t have time for anything else. If the hellhounds were half as powerful as the stories, we were so screwed. They’d picked up my scent by now. And they would hunt for as long as there was darkness. As soon as the sun came up, they’d have to rest. So I only had to keep us alive for six hours. No pressure.
Trey led our escape through the graveyard. His legs were a lot longer than mine, making it hard to keep up. The snarling of the hounds grew louder. I prayed fervently that they hadn’t broken through already.
At the gates, Trey stopped. A howling sound, warmer than the cold snarls of the hellhounds, came from the center of the graveyard. Trey’s head whipped around, his face taut with anger.
Trey wasn’t looking at me. He was looking back toward Grace’s monument. I glanced over his shoulder and saw something silver shimmering in the night. From this distance, I couldn’t see anything more, but it looked like a wolf. Standing with the hellhounds.
“They’re going to keep chasing us,” I said, holding on to his arm to keep myself up. “They’ll come for me.” We jumped the stone wall and stopped in the street.
“Hellhounds?” he asked, and I nodded. “We have to keep them away from the town.” If we could lead them away from the city, the odds of someone
getting hurt went down. Other than us.
I looked in both directions, before pointing north. “This way.”
“Sather Park’s up there.” Trey nodded, his tone grim. “Come on.”
We took off running again, Trey’s hand still wrapped firmly around my wrist. We passed the last two city blocks at the north edge of town and kept pushing forward. After a block, I yanked my hand free. “Hold on!” I had to know more. I closed my eyes, daring to only take a second to calm myself. When I opened them again, I turned back the way we’d come.
My visions were still there, still as strong as ever. I saw a trail of heat that showed our path and followed it back. I pushed out, somehow stepping out of my body and following the trail back. All the way into the cemetery where my magic still hung strong.
There was a silver wolf, smaller than the hellhounds, fighting two of them. A third was already on the ground, bleeding out dark magic and heart’s blood. There was no sign of the fourth. I looked closer, seeing brimstone and smoke that told me the fourth had gone the long way around. It had bolted for the other side of the cemetery, where the wall wouldn’t hold. And now it was trying to outrun us.
There was a piercing howl from the silver wolf. As I watched, the silver wolf growled, its snout shrinking but its legs thickening. Not silver, but mercury. Liquid, fluid, never staying constant.
Something started buzzing in my ear, but I shrugged it off. I breathed out, whispering trails of heat and smell from the cemetery that circled around each other. Trails that led away from the town, and left off where they began. Trails I hoped would confuse the wolves, and buy more time.
Trying to draw my vision back—to stop seeing the cemetery and start seeing the road again—was harder than I expected. The more I tried to pull away, the more the details of the wolf and the hellhounds drew me in. The mercury was scented with spikes of flame, rage this time and not magic. I couldn’t look away.
And then there was pressure on the sides of my head. I blinked, the vision dissolving and Trey reappearing. His hands were pressed on my head, and he was shouting.