The pawnbroker had shown her how to load the pistol with a bit of wadding and just the right amount of powder. She inserted the lead ball—smaller than she’d expected, but heavier, too—and rammed it down with a little rod that had its own sheath underneath the barrel. Such a cunning design. She thought the pistol was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Lifting it to her mouth, she licked the end of the barrel to see how it would taste. The oil on the metal was unpalatable, and for a brief moment her mind cleared and she thought—What am I doing? Why this, why now?
No. She would not place the barrel in her mouth like a man’s member. That was undignified.
She wanted to see it coming. So she lifted the pistol higher, until she could squint with one eye and look directly down the barrel at the waiting ball. It was black in there, as black as a pip. My ace, she thought. My ace of spades, hidden away to be brought forth when needed.
What a wonderful cheat to play on the world. On death. On life.
She did not blink as she pulled the trigger.
9.
The seventeenth century had been a hard time for witches. Pushed out of Europe by centuries of persecution, they had flocked to America looking for a new start, just like so many other marginal religious groups. They were a misunderstood lot. They were not Satanists, nor did they worship graven images in the woods, and very, very few of them ever flew on broomsticks. The vast majority were, in fact, devout Christians who just knew a bit more than their neighbors about herbal cures and simple, harmless charms. That was enough, unfortunately, to get them demonized by the Puritans and the Pilgrims, blamed for every manner of thing that went wrong in the fledgling colony of Massachusetts. In this way they were quite similar to the Quakers.
The Puritans hanged every Quaker they could get their hands on. Some managed to escape, first to Rhode Island, then to Pennsylvania, where they established a commonwealth, a place where all religions would be tolerated—to a degree. After the hysteria that gripped Salem and nearby towns at the end of the century, the witches flooded into Pennsylvania in search of that tolerance, and if they were not welcomed there with open arms, they were at least no longer hounded to death by the authorities.
Still, it wasn’t exactly the paradise they’d hoped for. The Quakers constantly tried to convert them, and while technically witchcraft wasn’t even a crime on the books, the people were happy to take matters into their own hands whenever a two-headed calf was born or a child got lost in the woods. In 1749, a mob nearly tore down a courthouse when a judge refused to convict a man known to practice witchcraft. In the more rural part of Pennsylvania, witches were dragged out of their beds and lynched right up until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The witches responded as they always had. They moved on. Yet not so far this time. They disappeared into the ridges of central Pennsylvania, ground so rocky and hard to till that nobody else wanted it. There they continued the old ways, carrying out ceremonies in the woods, performing their rituals behind closed doors. Their craft blended well with the folk magic brought to Pennsylvania by German immigrants—the hex signs they painted over their doors, the herbal lore found in that great book of medicine, The Long Lost Friend. They learned as well from the local Native Americans, so that in time their wisest practitioners became known as Pow-Wows, like Urie Polder.
There had never been very many of them, and only a dozen or so families still existed in Caxton’s time, all of them with elaborate genealogical charts to show they’d descended from Giles Corey or Dorcas Good or Rebecca Nurse, the famous victims of Salem. Their numbers were bolstered by the occasional hippie or New Age mystic who wandered into their sphere, though such people rarely stayed long. There was no Internet connection in the Hollow, no cell phone towers or even a local newspaper, and the New Age types needed to feel connected to the larger world.
The true witchbillies, the survivors of the old families, never left. They knew how little there was for them out in the wider world.
As they came out for the full-moon dinner that night, Caxton tried to imagine how Simon would see them. He must think they’d stepped straight out of a time warp.
The men dressed like Amish farmers and wore fringes of beard under their chins. The women kept their black dresses buttoned all the way up to the neck and down to the wrist, and their long skirts swept the dust of the common. The children dressed in more colorful clothes, but as modestly as Patience Polder, who was the closest thing the Hollow had to a fashion guru.
They looked very prim and proper. Except, of course, for the ones who didn’t.
Mixed in with the soberly dressed residents of the Hollow were women who draped themselves in silk shawls and tied kerchiefs around their heads like gypsy fortune-tellers. Some of the children wore T-shirts and shorts, while others had tie-dyed every garment they wore. There was one man who wore a long black cloak with a red lining and smeared kohl around his eyes, like a Goth pretending to be a movie vampire. One woman wore as little clothing as the law would allow but had covered all of her exposed skin in cabalistic tattoos.
Regardless of how they dressed, they descended on Simon like a flock of crows on a half-decayed badger. Visitors to the Hollow were incredibly rare and always the subject of much interest. The children wanted to sit in his lap or begged him to come play with them. The adults asked him a million questions about his family, very few of which he could answer. He did know that his mother was descended from both Sarah Osborne and Tituba, the Caribbean slave who had supposedly taught the girls of Salem how to do magic. He also knew that Astarte had become a Theosophist toward the end of her life, studying the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Apparently he had not realized that his father, Jameson, had also been a witchbilly, though of a decayed strain from North Carolina that had turned away from the old path.
The interest wasn’t entirely in his bloodstock, however. Or at least not directly. One of the women took his arm and smiled into his face until he looked at her. “We’re going to dance in the woods later, when the moon comes up. You’ll have to join us, of course,” she said. She batted her eyelashes and added, “It’s a full moon, so we’ll go skyclad.”
Simon frowned, trying to work out what she was saying. “Naked, you mean.” His mouth fluttered as if he was trying to decide whether to grin sheepishly or lasciviously. “You’re going to do a Wiccan ritual?”
She laughed fetchingly. “It’s what you do for fun when you don’t even have basic cable,” she told him.
She let him go with a smoldering look. Caxton pulled him away from the throng to make sure he got a good seat at the dinner table. “I don’t get this,” he told her. “That woman was wearing so many clothes I couldn’t even see her wrists. But I think she was coming on to me.”
Caxton had to laugh, despite herself. “You didn’t notice anything about the sex ratio here?” She gestured around at the gathered witchbillies. For every man around the picnic tables there were six women. “Trust me, she was definitely coming on to you. Some of them get desperate enough to come on to me.”
“But the clothes—they’re dressed like the Amish. My mom dressed modestly, but she wore stuff that had been designed in the twentieth century, not the seventeenth.” He shook his head. “They look like farmers, not witches. Or like they all belong to the same cult. Except—some of them don’t wear the Amish stuff, and—and—and you’re dressed like freaking Lara Croft.”
“Who?” Caxton asked.
“The Tomb Raider.”
Caxton stared down at her own clothes. It was summer, so she was wearing a tank top and cargo shorts. It was what she always wore.
Simon shook his head in perplexity. “They don’t mind you wearing that? Or—her?” He nodded at the tattooed woman, who had on one of the smallest tube tops Caxton had ever seen. The tattooed woman—her name was Glynnis, and she was a student of the Kabbalah, Caxton knew—stared back at Simon with pantherish eyes.
Caxton nodded in understandin
g. “You’re thinking that most of them are dressed modestly,” she said.
“Um, yeah,” Simon agreed.
“No. They’re dressed humbly. There’s a difference. Modesty is when you dress a certain way because you’re afraid men will be overcome by lust if they see what you’ve got. Humility means thinking nobody wants to see it.”
“Okay,” Simon said. He was having trouble not watching the tattooed woman arch her back.
“That’s the principle, anyway. It means you can dress however you want here, and nobody minds. Come on. Aren’t you hungry? It’s time to eat.”
10.
About half of the witchbillies were vegetarians, some of them pure vegans, some who just refused to eat meat. The rest seemed to take great relish in piling up chicken and pork bones on their paper plates. The wild corn couldn’t be eaten off the cob—it was nothing like the sweet corn Caxton had grown up eating—but it made excellent popcorn, which soon filled huge baskets all over the tables. There were loaves of fresh bread, leavened and unleavened, and pitchers of cream to pour over fresh berries. Caxton counted at least seven different varieties of potato salad, the traditional side dish of German immigrants everywhere, coleslaw with or without raisins, cornbread smeared with honey or molasses, buttermilk biscuits, baked beans, bean salad, bean casseroles, and bean barley soup. This on top of fried chicken, chicken fried steaks, pork ribs slathered with barbecue sauce, pierogies and dumplings and sauerkraut.
“Not exactly the healthiest meal I’ve ever seen,” Simon pointed out.
“It’s all organic, at least,” Caxton told him. “This is farmer’s food. It’s supposed to give you enough calories to work all day in the fields.” She made a plate for herself—mostly greens, with a single piece of fried chicken for protein—and stepped away from the table. “I’ll leave you to enjoy your dinner,” she told Simon. He looked like he might protest at being left alone, but two women came and sat down on either side of him and started piling food up in front of him and asking him so many questions he couldn’t get away.
Caxton never sat with the others during the full-moon dinners. It just wasn’t her way. It would be too easy to get caught up in the spirited discussions the witchbillies engaged in, endless debates over the proper way to harvest mandrake roots or what a given passage in the Bible had to say about necromancy. Then there were the endless squabbles and gossip over who was sleeping with whom and who wasn’t doing their fair share of work around the Hollow.
It was the background noise of a working community, and Caxton didn’t begrudge them their chatter. But it was also a distraction, and she weeded those out of her life wherever she found them.
So instead she wandered over to the fire pit, where Urie Polder was cooking a dozen fish at once. He needed no spatula, instead turning the fish with his wooden fingers. Apparently they didn’t feel the heat.
“He seems a good fella, ahum,” Urie said when she approached.
Caxton bit into her chicken thigh and said nothing. She looked out over a table covered in pies and Bundt cakes—just in case the witchbillies didn’t get enough to eat—and out into the gathering shadows beyond the common. The sun was almost down.
Some of the Hollow’s younger children were out there—the ones too young to sit through a meal without throwing a tantrum. They chased after things Caxton couldn’t see. Fairies and elves, or at least illusions of fairies and elves that their mothers had bewitched them to see. They grabbed at the imaginary creatures with chubby fingers and laughed when their hands closed on nothing. The sprites kept them close enough to the common that Urie could keep an eye on them.
Caxton finished her meal and threw away her plate. Wiping her hands on her shorts, she announced, “I’m going to take another look at the cordon.”
“You don’t trust me, as I’ve said it’s fine?” Urie asked, looking a little hurt.
“You know it isn’t that.”
“If my Vesta were still here, she’d have summat to say to you ’bout tryin’ to enjoy what you got before you lose it, ahum.”
Caxton ignored him. Vesta Polder was dead because Caxton hadn’t been fast enough to save her. She hadn’t been focused enough.
“We’ll send the dogs out after full dark,” Urie suggested.
Caxton nodded. Yes, they should do that. Vampires and their half-dead servants were unnatural creatures. Any animal more complex than a maggot could sense that. When a vampire came near, cows stopped giving milk. Cats went and hid under beds. Dogs, most usefully, started to howl, and wouldn’t stop until the vampire moved on. The Hollow was home to several dozen hounds of various breeds, all of whom were allowed to roam at night as a kind of early warning system.
“Just humor me. I won’t feel comfortable until I’m sure the trap is properly set,” Caxton said.
Urie Polder shrugged, his wooden arm lifting high. They had this argument so often he barely even tried anymore. “Alright, then. You go on. I’ll make certain the boy don’t get into any mischief, ahum. Leastwise, none that the ladies don’t concoct for him.”
Caxton squeezed his human shoulder, then turned to head into the dark, away from the people in the Hollow and the safety of numbers. She didn’t get very far, though. Before she even reached the road she heard someone pounding on the picnic tables for attention. Others took up the drumbeat and soon the Hollow was ringing with laughter.
She turned back to see what had gotten them so worked up, and saw Patience standing at the head of the table.
The girl was blushing again. She was wringing her hands in front of her and she wouldn’t look up to make eye contact with anyone.
In the entire time Caxton had known the girl, Patience had never looked so flustered. Normally it was the people around her who freaked out at what she said.
“I’d like to take this time,” the girl said, feeling her way through the words, “to make an announcement. I’m very happy.”
She bit her lower lip. Around her, her teenaged acolytes hugged themselves in excitement or bit their knuckles. They knew what was coming.
“I’m happier, I think, than I’ve ever been.”
Caxton frowned as she headed back toward the common and the light from the tiki torches. She had no idea what Patience was about to say.
“You see,” the girl stumbled on, “I met someone today. I met the man who is going to be my husband.”
Not a soul breathed in the Hollow. Even the children too young to understand what was going on must have sensed that something important was happening. Every eye fixed on Patience’s glowing face as she simpered and giggled. Then she did, finally, look up, to make eye contact with one man sitting at the table.
Every one of the witchbillies turned to follow her gaze. To look right at Simon, where he sat with a plastic fork and a bowl of coleslaw. Realization dawned on him very slowly, visibly, as he turned white and dropped his fork.
“Oh, fuck, no,” he wheezed.
11.
Simon jumped up from the table and held his hands up in front of him, as if he expected the witchbillies to seize him and force him to marry Patience on the spot, at gunpoint if necessary. The people gathered around the picnic tables all started talking at once, trying to reassure him.
“But it’s such an honor—”
“—she’s been waiting for you her whole life, and—”
“No use fighting, friend.” This with a friendly chuckle. “What she’s foretold—”
The boy’s face turned red with anger. “You are all fucking nuts. Nuts! I did not come here looking to marry some—some—prepubescent girl, much less the creepy prophet of some bizarre cult. I’m going to bring the police down here and they’ll—they’ll raid you. They will raid this place.”
Caxton grunted in annoyance and rushed forward to grab Simon’s arm. She hauled him away from the common. It wasn’t hard. Flustered as he was, he lacked the strength to resist.
She took him up the road that led back up to the top of the ridge, where he’d left
his car. When they reached the front of Urie Polder’s house, however, she kept walking, though she let go of him. It was his choice whether to follow her or not.
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to achieve, Caxton,” he called out, stomping after her as she headed into the tall grass beyond Urie’s garden. “I don’t know what sick fantasy you have about me becoming one of your cult groupies, but—”
“They are not a cult,” she said. She used the voice she’d honed when she used to be a cop. Calm, firm, and unyielding.
“Communal living. Naked dancing in the woods. Probably piles of guns sitting around all over the place. Oh my God. I had some cider with my dinner. I drank the cider. What did they put in the cider? Am I drugged? Did you drug me?”
She slapped him.
Just once, across the cheek. It was enough to shut him up.
“The cider was just cider. Now. Come with me. I’m going to show you something.”
She walked off again without stopping to wait for him to recover. He followed her as she made her way down a winding path to a stand of trees on the slope of the ridge. Each tree was circled by a length of chain, and hanging from each chain was what looked like a piece of tattered white muslin. Yet as they approached, the scraps of cloth began to stir. There was no breeze up on the ridge. Even the cicadas had stopped their thrumming song as Caxton took another step closer to the trees.
The piece of cloth nearest to her lifted in a way that looked almost like someone was manipulating it with a hidden wire. But there was no one there, and no wire. The cloth began to shift and stretch as it lifted. Then it began to take on the shape of a reaching hand.
It was dark up on the ridge. The moon hadn’t risen yet, and the stars, while plentiful so far from city lights, gave little illumination. The scrap of cloth was only so visible because of its lack of color. In the dim gloaming, it almost seemed to glow with its own light.
32 Fangs: Laura Caxton Vampire Series: Book 5 Page 5