Blood and Magick

by James R. Tuck

  Her head turned away from the light. She stopped rocking. Her eyes were slitted, watching me from the corners, bloody tears drying on her cheeks. They had become normal again. They looked like Kat’s eyes.

  I kept my voice a gentle as I could. “How ya doin’, kiddo?”

  Her voice was a tremble, the words twittery and broken as they came out. “I don’t . . . know. I can hear it in my head. The vampire. It’s in me. It is me.” She began to bang her forehead on her knees. “I’m thirsty, Deacon, so damn thirsty . . . and all I can smell is Larson’s blood, blood, blood. . . .” The rocking came back as she kept babbling, the word blood glitching over and over until it became nonsense.

  She looked up sharply. “All I want to do is to tear your throat out and let your blood rush down my skin. The vampire in my head is whispering to me, it wants to do all the things that were done to me to somebody else.” Eyes wide, she stared at me. “And I want to do that to somebody else. Somebody innocent.”

  In a blink, she was on her knees. It happened faster than I could see. I jumped, bringing the saint medal up between us. She recoiled against the wall.

  Too close. Too stupid.

  “You have to kill me. You can’t let me become this! You can’t let me be this thing!” Her hands grew into talons. She slashed at her arm. The skin laid open in four deep gashes. No blood welled up, the muscle underneath was gray and dull and dead. She held it out to me. “See! The only thing keeping me from tearing out your throat is that damned medal in your hand.”

  She drew to her feet like she was pulled up by strings. “I’m already dead, Deacon, keep me from being a monster.”

  I stepped backwards, moving carefully until there was space between us. I put the medal under my shirt.

  Kat shook from head to toe, a quick convulsion that rolled through her. Her head snapped up, fangs unsheathed, eyes gone to black and crimson pools of murder. A long, sibilant hiss rolled out of her mouth.

  She dropped low, crouching, and stayed like that a long moment. I could see her tense before she sprang. She moved like a human. It felt like hours of warning.

  I ducked to the left as she slammed into me. My arm came around, clamping on her forehead. I jerked her close, spinning and pressing her back to my chest. Leaning, I lifted her by her head, stretching her throat in a long line.

  My mouth was close to her ear. Tears spilled from my eyes, running down my face in hot trails. “I love you.”

  She growled, lost in animalistic, vampire thirst.

  The blade bit deep as I jerked it across.

  It took four times before she crumbled to dust in my arms.

  43

  “WHAT DID YOU DO?”

  Larson seethed, face red, veins bulging.

  I ignored him. Dust shook off me, Kat’s clothes peeling away like a ghost as I pushed the knife into its sheath. The snake in my guts was crawling, slithering into the hollow place in my chest.

  Kat’s dead.

  I just killed my friend. My sister.

  I started walking to the door.

  “Answer me! What did you do? You killed her, you sick, sick bastard! You’re a monster, Deacon Chalk.” Larson’s voice was a scream, high-pitched and metallic. “You killed the woman I love.”

  The air crackled. The hairs on my arms lifted up. Larson began chanting in the same guttural, inhuman language he had used before. The pressure in the room grew, building with each rotten syllable that fell from his lips.

  I turned.

  He stood in the middle of the room, in the pile of dust that used to be my sister Kat. Muscles knotted his jaw as he chanted, eyes rolled back in his head. His finger pointed at me like a claw. In his other hand was something that was beginning to glow with a corrupted yellow light that spilled out between his fingers.

  The air around me popped with stinging magick. Tiny, biting mouths of sorcery washing over me in an ozoneladen sweep. The lights flickered and dimmed. The taint of death magick hung heavy like curdled incense.

  The snake climbed higher.

  Reaching down inside, I grabbed my power. Shoving out, it cut through Larson’s magick like a scalpel. I drove it deep inside him. My mind’s theater clicked on and I could see the magick in him. It clung, hanging like malignant fruit, swollen full of rot and corruption. Like a chain of cancer running through him, he was stuffed with it. My power wormed deep inside, looking for something specific.

  Outside, I could feel the spell growing. It wouldn’t be but another moment or two before he completed it. Whatever he was casting felt immense, violent, and deadly. It would fall on me like an avalanche of hellfire and damnation. Racing the clock, I pushed harder, looking until I found it.

  There.

  Running through his blood was a thin silver thread. Father Mulcahy said all powerful magick users had fae blood somewhere in their family. I had just found Larson’s. My power clamped down on that silver thread and pulled, tracing the line of fae blood until it led me where I wanted to go.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Larson’s spine. Magick throbbed around it, wrapping the injury in a sticky pustule of sorcery. Liquid sacks of corruption held his backbone together, giving him the ability to walk again.

  The snake twisted.

  My power crashed into the magick brace around Larson’s spine, tearing it away in one swift, vicious yank. I watched it happen.

  His eyes widened, showing white all around. His breath stuck in his throat as he felt the vertebrae go. His chest slid forward in a jarring motion over his hips, like he was a game of Jenga whose pieces were starting to fall. I saw the vertebrae slip sideways in my mind’s eye. He crumpled to the floor.

  The spell died, breaking apart, dissolving into nothing.

  Stepping over, I crouched in front of Larson. He lay slumped on his side, legs sprawled out. Useless. His face was white with pain, fat droplets of oily sweat standing out on waxy skin. He breathed in small sips, taking in little bits of oxygen. Cornflower blue eyes rolled over, wide and skittery. They locked, focusing on me while he fought for air.

  I leaned in close, making sure he really saw me through the pain.

  “Disappear. Find some cave and drop off the face of the earth. Don’t be around people. Don’t be anywhere, because if I ever lay eyes on you again, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  I stood up and walked away, leaving him lying helpless on the floor.

  The snake twisted some more.

  44

  The taint of magick sloughed off, falling away like a thick sheet of dead flesh, as I stepped over the threshold of St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church. My body felt lighter, but my soul was just as heavy. The rage snake lay in my belly, coiled, not moving. It wasn’t time yet. It could wait.

  I was met inside the door by a nun with a gun. She sat on a small bench off to the side of the heavy wooden doors, wearing a full black habit. The toes of polished combat boots peeked out from under the hem. A starched coif and veil covered her head, draping down and framing a smooth face with narrow eyes. The gun pointed my way was a small, square bundle of death. A MAC-10 holding thirty rounds of .45-caliber righteousness it could spit out in seconds.

  Her finger was on the trigger.

  We stared at each other for a long moment.

  She stood, submachine gun disappearing inside a wide sleeve. The habit was modest, draping from head to toe. She wasn’t fat, but she was fleshy in that way some women are where they can fluctuate thirty pounds in any direction and still have guys following them home from the club. Not that nuns go to clubs.

  Then again, not that nuns hide submachine guns in their robes either.

  A silver pectoral crucifix hung from her neck on a braided black cord. It was big enough to be a breastplate. A rosary made of what looked to be polished teakwood beads the size of my knuckles hung from little hooks at her waist. She was a nun from top to bottom and looked like she could knock heads or break balls.

  “It’s good to see you again, Deacon. It’s been too many years.�
�

  Wait? What?

  I looked at her face hard, racking my brain. She was young, especially for a nun in a traditional habit. Nuns nowadays wear modern clothes. It’s a sign of a Sister’s hardcore dedication to the Church to wear the old-school full habit.

  She could still be in her teens or pushing thirty. Her narrow eyes were set in an unlined round face with a wide nose and a pair of undefined cheekbones. Her chin had a small dimple sitting below a wide bottom lip.

  “I’m sorry, Sister. It’s been a helluva night. We’ve met before?”

  She stepped around me, moving to the door. I caught a whiff of bleach and starched linen that always reminded me of nuns. Those full habits took some serious laundry, and every Sister I have ever met who wore one smelled exactly the same.

  She spoke over her shoulder, free hand turning bolts into place and locking the door. Her right hand, the one with the submachine gun, stayed inside her sleeve.

  “We met almost five years ago. I was just a kid.”

  “No disrespect, I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass, but if you could narrow that down just a little more.”

  She turned to face me. “Kaylee Ann Dobbs.”

  The name was a slap.

  When I first started hunting, I ran across my first lycanthrope, a real scum-sucking piece of shit named McMahon. He had been a crack-dealing, child-snatching cannibal.

  And a Were-polar bear.

  Hand to God, I shit you not.

  He kidnapped little Kaylee Ann Dobbs while she was on a field trip at school. I was hired to find her. The search led me to a ghetto where McMahon lived in a crackhouse, using his lycanthropy to protect the business.

  I met a little girl named Mary who was being dragged to McMahon by her mom to be traded for crack. I put a stop to that. I was too late to save little Kaylee Ann Dobbs, all I could do was avenge her, but Mary I had taken out of there. I dropped her off with Father Mulcahy to find a home for her.

  “Mary?”

  She smiled. It was a small, quick thing. “Sister Mary Polycarp now. I took my solemn vows last year. I work here with Father Mulcahy.”

  “Congratulations.” I looked around. My heart beat faster. “They did make it here, right? We were supposed to meet.”

  “They’re here. Follow me.”

  We walked to the end of the narthex, stopping at the fountain of holy water in the center so that I could dip my fingers in and cross myself. No matter how hellish the night had been, it couldn’t break a lifetime of habit. We continued to the other side where there was a hallway. I followed her, my mind swirling.

  Polecats was gone. Twenty-foot flames had been shooting into the night sky when I tore away in the Comet, racing to get Kat to help. We had roared by fire trucks as we flew down the highway. They were heading in the direction of the club with lights flashing and sirens wailing. They couldn’t have gotten there in time to save anything. The explosion had been too big, the flames too high.

  Plus, I had a basement full of stuff that would go bang and boom in a fire.

  The club had no chance.

  Sadness panged through me. I loved that club. It was my home and was full of people I had come to love. Now the girls who had worked there would have to find their own way. I would have to find a new income.

  If I lived through the night.

  The Wrath of Baphomet was powerful and deadly. They had cost me my club. They had cost me my friend.

  No more.

  It was time for some witches to die.

  Sister Mary pushed a button on the elevator at the end of the hall. The doors shooshed open. Stepping in made the elevator car shake, banging against the frame it rode in with dull metal thunks. Normally that would bother me. Tonight, I didn’t care.

  The elevator descended with a lurch. The interior filled with a low, grinding noise.

  It took me a minute to realize it was my teeth.

  We shuddered to a stop. The doors shooshed open, revealing another hallway. Sister Mary stepped out, leading me down the hall. With every step, she made a rustling clickclack noise of her rosary rubbing and bouncing against her hip. The MAC-10 swung freely in her hand and I realized I still didn’t have a gun. That was going to change. Like soon.

  The end of the hall was a vault door that took up the whole wall. It stood shut, large stainless-steel wheel in the center like an old bank vault. It was the secret stash. The good stuff. The real shit.

  The Vatican keeps strongholds around the world. Places where they store occult items for safe keeping and antioccult weapons for preparation. St. Augustine’s was the main one in North America.

  The vault was the center of a five-foot-thick block of solid concrete and set under the pool of holy water from upstairs. The walls were inlaid with crucifixes that were blessed thrice daily, and the ground the vault sat under had been consecrated for generations. The stuff locked inside it was as safe as could be.

  Why didn’t the Vatican just destroy it all?

  Because of the demons. When an object is made into an occult weapon, it is imbued with power through ritual, sacrifice, and being used in an evil or blasphemous way. These actions draw demons to it and trap them inside where they lay dormant, becoming a power source for spells and witchcraft. If the object is destroyed, then the demons are released.

  The Vatican is not in the practice of releasing demons.

  Instead, the Holy See locks them away to keep them out of the hands of wrongdoers.

  Halfway down the hall, Sister Mary took a sharp left into an alcove set back in the wall. She knocked sharply on the door, then opened it.

  I walked into a roomful of people who were staring at me.

  Boothe and Josh sat together on a low-slung couch. Josh was tucked under the big man’s arm, his head on Boothe’s shirtless chest. Boothe had dozens of adhesive bandages stuck to him, and his shoulder had the pockmarked look of road rash.

  Shrapnel.

  Josh was wrapped in a blanket, his head swathed in a thick gauze bandage like a turban, but his eyes were bright and clear. He tried to sit up as I walked in, but Boothe pulled him back down.

  Ronnie sat cross-legged in a chair that matched the couch. She was rocking back and forth, making thick ringlets of hair shimmy and shake. Scattered on her and the chair were several of the ghost spiders. They jumped up as I walked in, zipping up and away on near-invisible monofilaments of webbing. Her eyes were wide and unfocused as she turned toward me.

  Special Agent Heck and Father Mulcahy stood in one corner, turning as I entered. Both of them were smoking, cigarettes in their hands while they had been talking. Special Agent Heck had a wide burn across his forehead, the skin red and blistered. His whole body looked singed, black suit ragged with holes burned through the material.

  Father Mulcahy leaned heavily on a crutch. A brace wrapped his leg from midthigh to shin. It was the leg he limped on. The leg that hadn’t been the same since being slashed open by a vampire slave of that evil bitch Appollonia last year.

  He still looked gray, his complexion wan and washed out. A large bruise crawled up his face, making his jaw and cheek puffy. His lip had been split, a nasty dark scab across it. It had to hurt each time he took a puff on his cancerstick.

  That didn’t stop him from doing it.

  He looked tired.

  Tiff stood. She had been kneeling beside Sophia. The Were-dog was wiping red-rimmed mismatched eyes. The look on her face wasn’t sorrow, it was anger. Raw, unbridled hatred. Pale European skin flushed a dark red that made her russet hair seem shinier. Her hands were shaking as she smeared the tears on her face.

  Standing beside them was a little towheaded boy with cowlicks and his momma’s eyes. He was all alone. A chubby hand patted his mom on the arm. I closed my eyes deliberately, opening them slowly.

  The kid was still human.

  I filed it away as Tiff stepped to me. She was dirty again, soot smudged across her skin and clothes in abstract, almost tiger-stripe patterns. It did her no good
to have showered earlier.

  The thought of the shower sent a twinge through me.

  She was still wearing her black leather jacket. It had protected her from the explosion. Her hair was wild, tossed out around her face like a mane, but other than that she could have been going out on a Friday evening.

  Her face turned to me, voice soft. “How are you, baby?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “How’s . . . ?”

  I raised my voice. I only wanted to say it once. “Kat’s dead.”

  The words hung in the air, filling the room. They swelled in the silence, racing along cracks in the walls like water soaking a sponge as everyone absorbed what I said.

  Father Mulcahy looked slapped by the news. His head dropped in prayer.

  Tears began to flow down Sophia’s face again, dripping off her chin, soaking into her hair.

  Boothe’s face became stoic, bland, folding away in pain.

  Josh hadn’t worked with Kat for the last few months like Boothe had. He pushed up, wrapping his arm around the big man’s neck, pulling him close in comfort.

  Ronnie stopped rocking and stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes.

  Special Agent Heck gave a small nod of sympathy.

  Tiff’s face broke just a little, jaw tensing and her bottom lip quivering to hold it together. She blinked tears away from her eye and stepped into me. I put my arms around her, holding her, trying to comfort her around the wide hollow place inside me.

  After a moment, she pulled away.

  No one spoke. One by one their faces turned to me. I didn’t have any inspiration. No comfort inside me. The only thing I had at the moment was the desolation of my friend’s death.

  That and the twisted snake of hatred for the witches responsible burrowed deep in my guts.

  I cleared my throat, looking at no one in particular.

  “Kat is dead because of Selene and her people. I don’t have time to mourn my sister. Right now, you don’t have time to mourn her either. This thing we do has a cost, a price that is sometimes too hard to bear. But we don’t have a damn choice. This is the deal. This is the gig. This is the job. Push your pain aside and man the fuck up because we’ve got work to do.”