Maisie’s scream emerged as a whistle, not from her mouth but her throat, on a stream of hot blood.
Violina reached into her Louis Vuitton purse and withdrew a gold goblet, thrusting it under Maisie’s chin to catch the flow, holding the dying girl’s head steady via a rough claw-hold in her hair.
Chapter 17
Spilt Blood
Answering the door to Ysabella’s suite, Stella furrowed her brow on seeing McGlazer’s expression. “You’re not sick too, are you?”
“No. Just have something on my mind.” He followed her to the bedroom entrance to look in on Ysabella. “How is she?”
“It’s something more than just exhaustion.”
“You have a theory?”
Stella grimly shook her head. “Judging by her temp, vitals—she’s getting worse.”
Another knock. As Stella moved to answer it, McGlazer stopped her. “Let me get it. It might be the only way I can be useful.” Stella didn’t ask what he meant.
“Here’s your prayer circle, Reverend.” At the door stood Bernard, surrounded by familiar faces—Candace at his side, Emera in his arms, Elaine Barcroft, Leticia Lott holding little Wanda and Jill Hawkins behind him, DeShaun and Stuart nearby with Bravo.
McGlazer let them in, well aware that his smile was far from genuine, and leaned close to Bernard. “Can we talk?”
Bernard blinked with surprise. “You and me?”
The new arrivals murmured their hellos, taking in Stella’s gloomy update on Ysabella. Little Emera, sensing something wrong under the pall of low light and whispers, crept into the candlelit bedroom and saw her new friend. “Miss Iss?” the girl whispered.
When there was no answer, her little face grew alarmed. “Cannisss!” she stage-whispered and waved for her sister to come, as she crawled into bed and hugged close against Ysabella.
In the front room, McGlazer came to stand close to Bernard. “You’re an atheist, right?”
“Well…yeah, sure.”
“I’m…not so sure myself anymore,” McGlazer confided.
“You mean, about God?”
“Lately…this job seems forced. Dishonest.”
Bernard nodded knowingly. “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know exactly. It just didn’t feel true anymore, the prayers and scripture. It didn’t feel like any of it was…making its way to a god.”
“Yet here you are, saddled with the job of minister.”
“I can’t do this anymore, Bernard. And I know I’m going to disappoint a lot of people. As I have in the past.”
“This isn’t the same as alcoholism,” Bernard said. “And it’s not…a hat you lost somewhere, that you can find or replace.”
“Any advice?”
Bernard thought for a minute, nodding with empathy. “One thing I’ve learned from Stella. Regardless of what’s ‘true’ about spirituality, there’s a lot of power in ritual and ceremony. I think it has something to do with focus and the subconscious—but I know it works.”
“Where does that leave me and my sad little crisis of faith?”
Pondering, Bernard glanced toward the bedroom and raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s not as big a problem as you think.”
At Emera’s insistence, the women, all except Jill, had gathered on and around the bed, all making contact with the crone, all holding hands.
Jill put her arms on the shoulders of DeShaun and Stuart. “That’s a whole lot of what you call ‘goddess power’ there, boys.”
“What about you?” Stuart asked.
“I’m on it.” Jill whisked away to the kitchenette and returned with a deep pot. She smiled at the boys as she sat cross-legged near the bed and put her percussionist skills to work, pounding a soft steady rhythm that summoned ethereal feelings.
“Maybe we should go try to find Ysabella’s friends,” Bernard said.
* * * *
Violina absently wondered what tune it was that played incessantly inside her skull while she was prepping the church basement.
Lush and insistent, orchestral yet soothing, Violina knew it would come to her if she stopped thinking about it. Her subconscious would continue to dig, as it did now for the sigil in the Polaroids she had purloined from the Cronus County evidence tombs.
She cast a new circle for her new purpose. Ceremonial candles lit, she switched off the electric light at the stairwell and crept back to the rear chamber in the dim flicker.
Using a brush with bristles made from the hair of a black horse, Violina dipped into the bowl and repainted the sigils that had been so recently blasted away. She had studied the police Polaroids and repeatedly drawn them on a notepad until she could flawlessly reproduce them from memory.
Not that she couldn’t wash away any mistakes and restart—but that was such a waste of blood.
Ideally, she would have had an assistant for all that she had to do next. But there hadn’t been time to bend Maisie to her will properly, and even if there had been, that would leave the problem of finding a blood source. Still, she would need someone to do the messier work that lay ahead.
Humming the mystery music to warm up her vocal cords, Violina took a moment to admire the dead girl lying crumpled on the floor, even to mourn her a bit. Left pale by the draining of her blood, Maisie reminded Violina of the fairy-tale naïf Snow White, who had also fallen to the wiles of a wicked witch.
Violina grinned at the Disney image. Women of absolutes: good or evil, with no gray area. If not for that, it might be easier to recruit so-called baneful witches, and then to change the world.
She considered the incessant earworm for a moment, and it hit her, drawing a fittingly wicked laugh—“Orinoco Flow,” by Enya.
She chased it away and began to chant something else from memory, a Latin rite of transmigration.
Hands upraised, she slowly spun left, calling out the incantation with purpose and echoing volume.
Counting seven revolutions, Violina stopped and faced the blood sigil, pleased to see an eldritch red glow cracking around the edges.
* * * *
The glow, which began at the edges of the sigil, quickly grew brighter until all detail was lost, leaving only an shimmering portal into the InBetween.
“I grant you, Conal O’Herlihy, earthly manifestation here! Now!” Violina made an insistent summoning gesture, her tone commanding and assured.
Soon a nebulous shape formed in the opening, growing in size and detail until cruel and wary eyes, set in hazy features, peered out on her. “What is this?”
“Pleased to meet you, Conal O’Herlihy. I’ve heard so much.”
“Do not trifle, fool.”
“Now, let’s not be like that,” Violina said. “I’m here to make you an offer.”
“First, the price.”
“That’s the beauty, dear Conal. The price is part of the benefit.”
The spirit began to fade away.
“You and your followers, back in this plane physically,” Violina explained. “And quite immortal.”
“Why would I wish to return to the limitations of the physical world?”
“No need to be coy, old boy,” Violina laughed. “You wander aimlessly in the emptiness, lamenting your failures here. You miss the solidity, the definiteness of the living world.”
Conal’s silence was encouraging.
“Flesh is more easily controlled,” she continued. “And more amusing.”
“I worked to preserve our bodies in the fungus. But they were destroyed.” Was O’Herlihy showing the regret of his failure?
“In this time, magic is no longer so well-suppressed. And I’m a more powerful witch than you can even imagine.”
Again, Conal was silent.
“You’ve been tied to those flimsy old mushroom bodies and this musty ruin for so long. Imagine being s
omething stronger.”
“You do sing a siren song.”
“No crashing against the rocky shores, Conal. I will make you powerful and terrifying, and you’ll only grow stronger, feeding off your victims. You and all your poor, displaced followers.”
“And in these great and terrible bodies, we’ll be expected to serve you in some manner?”
“I want to share in your immortality. You’ll show me how.”
“And…?”
“You’ll help me bring all other witches to heel.”
The spirit’s detail grew sharper than ever, until she could see the very pupils of his stony eyes—and his sinister smile.
“The secret is the fungus,” Conal said. “So long as it grows, the soul of its partakers can travel in and through it.”
“Then we have a problem,” Violina said. “Your fungus is extinct.”
“You’re wrong. There is a scrap that needs but to be nourished.”
“And you know where to find it?”
The edges of the sigil flared, and Violina was stunned to feel a powerful wind suddenly kicking up in the isolated chamber and then focusing around her, becoming a vacuum force.
She was drawn toward Conal’s cruel countenance like steel filings to a magnet. Certain that Maisie’s body and the other items in the room would be sucked by the tide and made to smash into her, Violina glanced behind her. Trying to shield her face with her arms, she raised them, only to have them pulled toward the portal as if lassoed and yanked.
The vortex affected only her.
She saw that Conal’s visage was gone, replaced beyond the boundaries by a dark, modern-looking room.
She lost her footing and fell forward, headfirst, into the opening, only to be abruptly halted by the solid edges of the chamber wall, closed snuggly around her neck.
The room was quiet, spacious, unoccupied. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw shelves, tables, a wall of windows and a tall metal cabinet. From the crack between the cabinet doors, a dim glow shone. To the right was a set of stairs set against a cinderblock wall.
Violina saw a flyer posted on the wall. It read ember hollow library fall book sale!
The pull of the vortex relented, as the edges of the wall began to close. Violina quickly withdrew, stumbling backward until she tripped over Maisie’s corpse.
Conal was back, framed once again by the eldritch opening. “We will wait for you. And anticipate these new bodies.”
* * * *
Yoshida might have stayed unconscious for a much longer time, if not for the pain of his broken ankle.
Lying on the floor of his demolished bedroom, nearly naked and wrapped in chains wasn’t the worst possible outcome he could imagine. He was relieved to see Dennis and Pedro squatting to look at his ankle, both okay other than a few scratches and contusions. “What happened?”
“You wolfed out hard-core, man.” Dennis answered. “Not like the bikers, but you’ll get there next time, or maybe the time after, if we don’t do something.”
Yoshida leaned forward to examine his throbbing foot, flexing it up and down gingerly. “Who cranked my ankle?”
Dennis and Pedro looked at each other with astonishment. “You did. And it was a lot worse just a minute ago.”
“Must be part of the condition. You heal in record time.”
“Did I bite you guys?”
“No, but not for lack of trying,” said Pedro, cupping his hands around Yoshida’s ankle, squeezing lightly. “That don’t hurt?”
“A little.”
“Screw the circus,” said Dennis. “We’re selling you to science.”
“You have to go get those witches,” Yoshida said. “Make them do their thing.”
“They’re not answering at the Blue Moon. Maybe I should try to track ’em down.” He turned to Pedro. “Unless you want the excuse to see your new fan.”
“Nah, you go,” Pedro said. “Not feeling too smooth right now. But we should go to my place, try to get some rest.”
Dennis shook his head grimly. “Another whacked-out Devil’s Night.”
“At least Yoshi smells better than those bikers.”
“Depends on who you ask, I guess.”
“Never thought I’d say this…” Yoshida stood to test his ankle. “Could we just focus on getting me neutered?”
Chapter 18
Beauty of Poison
Violina parked her Cadillac well out of range of the gas station’s security cameras. As she walked, the dense gray sky seemed to query her. Violina nodded as if to say, Not just yet…
Armed with tailored, almost-tight Earnest Sewn jeans, a scent of her own design that called forth trust and lust, a smile emphasized by lipstick a shade lighter than blood and a tiny flask of “treated” whiskey, Violina entered Gas Giant, Ember Hollow’s resident truck stop/gas station/Halloween shop.
She smiled to the new-wave-styled teen girl behind the counter. Engrossed in a Terry Pratchett novel, the girl ignored Violina.
She traipsed between an aisle of chips and crackers, grimacing at the rack of slogan-printed lingerie, and made her way past the eighty-nine-ounce soda fountain and a glass-faced warmer, where glossy hot dogs rolled on metal bars, to the rear dining room.
One man sat alone at the nearest plastic table, his arms crossed, a foam and mesh cap sitting high on his sun spotted head. He stared at his barbecue sandwich and fries as if working up the courage to eat them.
Violina took a seat across from him, beaming like a diva’s spotlight. “Good evening!”
The bleary-eyed trucker gave the merest of nods. Violina was not discouraged in the least. “Is that your truck out in the rear lot?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
Violina’s smile faded to an expression of deep sadness. “Dear Lord. So many memories.”
“Ma’am?”
“My brother drove one that looked just like it. He died in an accident.”
“Oh, my Lord. Condolences, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” She extended her hand. “I’m Violina.”
“Steve.” He took her hand in an indifferent grip.
“I hope you won’t find this too…odd,” Violina began. “I used to ride with him. I would love to just sit in the front for a minute.”
“Well”—Steve shrugged and took a bite of his sandwich, making it bleed brown juice onto his glistening fries—“I don’t see why not.”
“Oh, bless you.” She kept his hand for a moment, letting him feel its softness.
Steve finished his sandwich and fries quickly and stood to dump his tray. “Ready?”
Violina followed him, glad to see the counter girl still ignoring them as they exited and walked around to the rear parking lot, where Steve’s idling rig sat. The only other vehicle was the counter girl’s ’78 Camaro.
Pulling his hat down against the rising wind, he stepped up on the running board and opened the door, then stepped off. “All yours, as long as you need it, ma’am.”
Violina gave a gracious smile and stepped up, disappointed that Steve had not propositioned her—yet. Any footage picked up by security cameras would show what could only be a trucker and his conquest leaving for a tryst. And though she didn’t plan to need the alibi, it was good to have a contingency plan.
“So much like his truck,” she said wistfully.
Steve maintained a respectful silence and distance. Violina realized she would have to work harder than usual to dissolve his gallantry.
“Oh!” Violina leaped off the running board with a faux clumsiness, widening her eyes exaggeratedly for Steve to see in the weak light of the streetlamp. “There’s…something…”
“What!?” Steve seemed excessively concerned about his traveling home.
Violina stammered “I—I…don’t know, maybe a mouse.” She took on a fr
ightened expression. “No. A rat, as big as it was.”
“What!?” Steve was embarrassed.
“Dear God!” Making her hands tremble, Violina drew the little glass flask she had prepared and pretended to take a draw, very careful that she didn’t. “It dashed under the driver’s seat,” she said .
As Steve drew his flashlight keychain, Violina stepped toward and offered the flask. “You should have a sip. To calm your nerves.”
Steve looked at the flask, then at Violina’s crimson lips. “I’ll have a bit afterward.”
Steve leaped up on the running board, drawing his little keychain flashlight. “I’ll find you, you little vermin,” he threatened under his breath. “And I’ll squeeze you flat.”
Improvising, Violina went around to the passenger side and opened the door.
“Hold up, ma’ am,” Steve said. “Close that door so he don’t get away!”
She stepped up, dumping the flask contents into her mouth.
“Ma’am? Did you hear what I…?”
Violina blew the liquid into Steve’s face. He fell backward onto the pavement with a shocked cry.
Violina spat and coughed, miffed at having to engage in such low-class behavior. As she wiped her tongue and gums with a silk kerchief, she hurried to check on Steve.
“Stand up,” she ordered.
Steve complied, staring at her with frightened eyes, one of only two physical functions he could control.
“What…did…?”
“Good,” she said, checking the back of his head for damage. “There’s a lot I need you to do tonight.”
Steve shook with terror, fully understanding his body would not respond to his brain. “What did you…do to me!”
“Not what did I do, dear,” Violina said. “What will I do.”
She spat again, careful to flush out even the most minute remnants of the puffer-fish-poisoned whiskey. “And the answer is…use you up and throw you away.”
* * * *
Herve must have already been feeling bad; he didn’t come back to his seat for fifteen minutes. When he did, he looked like a wax figure.
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