Unholy

by Bill Bennett

  About the Book

  The second gripping novel in acclaimed Australian filmmaker Bill Bennett's compelling series about modern-day witchcraft.

  Lily heard a sound that sent her into a sudden inexplicable panic.

  A sound so primitive, it chilled her to her bones.

  Try as she might, Lily could not control the fear that surged through her.

  The creature was an emissary of Satan.

  As the celestial firestorm night of Unholy nears, Lily finds herself caught deep within the shadow world of black witchcraft - a world more evil than she ever could have imagined.

  In the race to save her mother’s soul, Lily will need all of her strength and newfound powers to battle the elite witches hell-bent on her capture.

  A relentless page-turner, with plot twists that will shock and disturb - Unholy unleashes the darkness that seeks to destroy the world as we know it.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  EPILOGUE

  PALACE OF FIRES: BEAST

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY BILL BENNETT

  IMPRINT

  READ MORE AT PENGUIN BOOKS AUSTRALIA

  PROLOGUE

  County Fermanagh, Ireland

  1710

  Jennett Maguire walked up to the moss-covered gate and looked out over her field at the workers harvesting her crop. It would be a bountiful season. Seventeen years earlier, she’d stood at that same gate and signed away her soul for the abundance that she now enjoyed. She was sixteen then and her family was starving. Her father was near death and her mother was suffering from a malady of the lungs that had claimed the life of Jennett’s younger sister the previous year.

  In those dark days it was not uncommon for her family to go several days without anything on the table other than a bowl of thin barley soup, or a plate of stunted carrots. Blight had hit the valley and every farm was suffering, their crops riddled with disease.

  Seventeen years ago she’d stood at that gate and looked out over a field that held no hope, no prospects other than misery and despair. It was a field full of disease, full of death, a field full of sorrow.

  But then a handsome lord had appeared and offered her salvation. If she signed her soul over to Satan, he would guarantee abundance until her last dying breath. Her family would nevermore be in need.

  She had refused, at first. But he’d been charming, beguiling; he had swept away her reluctance with the radiance of his smile and the laughter in his clear blue eyes.

  And his argument certainly had merit: What was a soul anyway? Could it buy medicines or the care of nurses or doctors? Could it buy thick blankets to keep away a night’s chill? Could it feed her brother, who tugged at her dress constantly, asking what was to eat?

  And so he slit the flesh on the palm of her hand and she signed in blood on a sheet of goatskin parchment. And almost immediately, her world changed. She had enough money to pay for a doctor, to buy the potions and tinctures he advised. Her father recovered. Her ma too. They began to eat pork and wild fowl, and later venison – a luxury that very few could afford, not even the High Street merchants with their waistcoats and gold watches swinging from chains.

  Soon, though, there were whispers around the village. Talk of her being a witch. That she’d made a pact with the devil for her current good fortune. That she was in the employ of Satan. Her friends began to avoid her. They averted their eyes at market. When she approached the well in the village square they all quickly dispersed. She discovered that they were frightened to be alone with her. They never visited the farm. And when she dropped by to see them, there was always a reason why now was not a convenient time. Perhaps another time; perhaps after harvest.

  Her father died a few years later. He stumbled and fell while ploughing. Hit his head on a rock and split his skull. Blood poured from his ears. Her ma followed shortly after. Many in the village put it down to grief, but Jennett knew different. Her ma had been bitten by a diseased rat that took her to the brink of madness before finally, thankfully, death claimed her. Then her brother was murdered. In Dublin, in a back alley, for his fancy boots. Their wealth, their abundance, hadn’t protected them from the vicissitudes of life. On the contrary, their deaths seemed to be a bitter tax she had to pay for all that she now had.

  The village pastor began to take a disturbing interest in her. He would wait till she wasn’t at home then climb over the stone fences into her fields, watch the abundant harvests when all the farmlands around her were blight-ridden and barren. She started to hear talk that he was planning a trial. If the church found her to be a witch, then she would suffer a most hideous death – execution by stoning, or possibly fire.

  Lonely, grieving, scared and unwanted, she sought out the handsome lord. She found him in his castle on a hill on the other side of the village. He comforted her, with more than mere words. And soon she became his mistress, his plaything, his distraction. He protected her from the church. They dared not confront him, afraid that by doing so, he might find reason to end his generous contributions to their weekly donation box.

  The castle’s lord introduced her to the dark arts and she became his pupil. His avid pupil. She devoured his teachings, read every book in his vast library – some many hundreds of years old. With her newfound knowledge, and with hours upon hours of practice, she soon developed skills and powers that impressed even the lord himself. In a couple of years she had become a potent witch. A real witch.

  What the lord and his Master and Mistress, the Two Evil, didn’t know was that Jennett Maguire had no interest in the dark arts. It disgusted her, as did Satan. As did the handsome lord. She was acquiring the knowledge of their obscene craft so that she could adapt it for her own particular purpose, which was for beneficence. For the good of her village. For the good of all. But also to make amends for what she’d done – for signing away her soul to true evil, which had only brought her tragedy and sorrow.

  Yes, she had all she could wish for, but she had nothing too. Less than nothing. She had heart-wrenching loss. She had nightmares and horrors. She had crippling guilt. She needed to atone. And the only way she could do this was to reclaim her soul and spend the rest of her life in service of others. She needed to become a witch, all right, but a warrior witch. She needed to learn how to fight on their terms. On the terms of the most powerful witches known to humankind.

  And so Jennett Maguire slowly and secretly enlisted the help of
others – young girls or women in the village and surrounding district who had lost mothers or aunts or sisters to hangings or burnings, orchestrated by the church because they’d been deemed to be witches. Some had merely administered odd potions to the ailing, others had been blamed for a failed crop or a freakish storm. Still others had been found to have a physical deformity that branded them as witches. And so they were publicly executed at the hands of a venal male clergy determined to repress feminine power through terror and oppression.

  The daughters, sisters, relatives and loved ones of these women harboured a quiet vengeful anger, which Jennett put to good use in the formation of a band of neophyte witches that embraced a code of avenging grace. Trained by Jennett, who in turn was still being trained by the lord, they quickly acquired the skills of witchcraft. Soon they would call themselves Cygnet, a name that Jennett chose after sitting by a pond near her farmhouse watching a swan with a ring of cygnets in tow. To her, the tiny white baby swans were a perfect symbol of purity and goodness – traits she hoped would be the underlying characteristic of her coven of white witches. In the face of such vile darkness, there needed to be a countering, challenging light. And it would be Cygnet.

  Standing at the gate to her fields, she watched as her workers loaded their wooden barrows. One by one they wheeled past her to the stone storeroom at the back of the farmhouse, where the potatoes would be bagged ready to take to market the following day. There was enough in this one harvest alone to allow her to live comfortably for the next year, perhaps longer. And there were her savings, too, which were considerable. For the past several years she’d been earning far more than she could ever hope to spend, particularly now she was on her own.

  But none of that mattered anymore. She had to reclaim her soul. She had to destroy the contract that she’d signed with the lord of the castle. But would the destruction of that goatskin parchment expunge the debt? Would it be that simple? Or was her soul doomed for all eternity, irrespective of the physical state of what she’d signed? One thing she knew: she could not lead Cygnet in its fight against the witches of the night while she had a soul connection to Satan. She had to break that connection. She had to rescind the contract. But how?

  It moved into myth, what happened.

  Jennett stole into the castle late one night and searched every hall, every bedchamber, every possible hiding place. She knew the contract was within the stone walls somewhere, she just had to find it. The castle stood on a rocky crag that had been the site of a massacre during Norman times. Some in the village said that it had been rebuilt on the graves of the dead, and on certain celestial phases blood swilled down the passageways and the fallen rose to fight again.

  On that particular night, Jennett went to the castle’s chapel to seek inspiration. The only place she hadn’t checked was the lord’s bedchamber, but he was asleep and she worried that if she tried to sneak in and search, she would wake him. While in that chapel a vision came to her, of a beast with two heads – a boar’s head with large tusks and a goat’s head with sharp twirling horns. She knew in her heart that this beast was Satan. It stood at the door of the chapel, as if fearing to come in, and in an echoed voice from two mouths, a voice that sounded like it came from the fiery pits of hell, it said to her, ‘Follow me.’

  Jennett, in her vision, followed the two-headed beast down a stone corridor, with flaming torches in brackets on walls either side. The creature that was Satan stopped from time to time and looked back at her – one head over one shoulder, the other head over the other shoulder – to see if she was following. Finally it stopped outside a wide oak door, which Jennett knew was the entrance to the lord’s opulently decorated bedchamber. She had been there before, many times.

  The beast stamped its foot at the door and in her vision the lord let her in. He led her across a vast stone floor to his velvet-covered four-poster bed, at the foot of which was a large brass-bound chest. He opened this chest and produced the contract. Jennett stared down at the goatskin parchment. There was her mark, in blood, just as she’d remembered signing it so many years earlier, when she was an innocent lass.

  And then the vision was gone.

  Like a flame extinguished.

  She stood and walked out of the chapel and along a series of hallways and corridors until she came to a long passageway, at the end of which was the wide oak door of the lord’s bedchamber. She opened the door silently and slipped inside. In the darkness she could hear his regular breathing. He was asleep. She could smell his perfumed body.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, she stepped forward to his bed, one foot stealthily in front of the other, moving like a shadow, quiet as the night. She reached the foot of his bed and looked at his form, hidden by bed sheets. His breathing hadn’t skipped a rhythmic beat, yet she knew him to be a light sleeper. The slightest noise could awaken him in an instant. She bent down to the large brass-bound chest and went to lift the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. She tried again, trying not to make a sound, but the lid held firm.

  And then Jennett saw that it was locked with a big brass padlock. This hadn’t been in her vision. She stood, wondering what to do, and saw that the lord was now standing beside the bed, holding a knife – the same knife that years earlier he’d used to slash the palm of her hand to draw blood for the contract.

  Jennett turned and ran. She fled out the door and down the corridor. As she ran past the flaming torches on the walls they flickered and died, leaving a trail of darkness in her wake. But out of that darkness came a chilling sound, of snuffling breaths and the clipped sound of cloven hooves on stone. She turned to see, hurtling out of the darkness, the two-headed beast – the boar and the goat. The boar’s eyes were red, the goat’s were yellow. Sparks flew from its hooves as it charged down the corridor.

  Jennett raced around a corner and came to a sudden halt, because ahead of her was a large oak door. Was it the door to the lord’s bedchamber? But how could that be? She’d just come from there. It looked identical. She’d run into a closed corridor. Other than the door ahead of her, there was nowhere else to go. She raced forward, grabbed the door’s latch but it wouldn’t open. She pulled again and again. Still it wouldn’t give. She could hear the beast getting closer. And then it bounded around the corner, skidding on the stone floor before barrelling in, its two heads lowered ready to impale her against the door with its tusks and horns.

  Jennett gave one last final lunge and the door opened and she tumbled inside, slamming it shut just as the beast hurtled into it, hitting it with such force that the tips of its tusks and horns came right through the thick oak door and out the other side. Jennett stood back and stared, gulping air, shivering with fear. Or had the room suddenly, inexplicably, gone cold?

  Outside, the beast bellowed with rage as it tried to pull loose its horns and tusks. With each attempt the massive door shook on its hinges. Jennett turned to look for a way out – and gasped, because standing in front of her was the lord, dressed in all his finery. But he looked different. His skin was covered in tiny green scales, his hands were claws, and his tongue was red and snake-like. His eyes were dancing flames and when he spoke, he smelt of burning embers.

  ‘So, Jennett,’ he said sweetly, his voice like a whispered dream. ‘I understand that you want to change the terms of our arrangement?’

  CHAPTER 1

  To Lily, weak from a witch’s poison and hanging on for dear life, all was a blur. She was on the back of a motorbike, holding onto the waist of the most gorgeous young man she’d ever met, as they hurtled through desert brush towards a distant pillar of rock called the Needle, which rose from the surrounding plains like a defiant finger jabbing up to the heavens.

  Skyhawk Nuevo was taking her to his ancestral home somewhere north of Santa Fe in the remote New Mexico desert, to a village perched up top of the Needle. He called it a sacred place. It was where he hoped his mother could find a way to rid her of the poison that was now making everything so surreal. So smeared.

  She w
as quickly slipping into a place between wakefulness and dreams, a dark velvet place that wanted her, that pulled at her, a place she knew she could never return from, should she allow herself to freefall into its soft limitless void. Her only hope was to cling tightly to what she knew, to what was real, to who she was.

  But who was she?

  And what did she really know?

  And what was real?

  A week ago, or was it ten days ago now … she’d lost track of time … she lived with her mom on a farm in a valley north of San Francisco. She loved her mom like nothing on earth. Her mom was her only true friend. But then that farmers’ market happened last Saturday morning. Three vicious-looking biker women turned up, looking for someone. Her mom, Angela. And the biker women were witches.

  How did she know that? Lily, holding on tight, bouncing over hillocks of stones, reached back into the past as a means to keep herself in the present. She knew they were witches because after her mom went missing, a detective took over the investigation. Marley. She seemed like a good cop. Knew what she was doing. But then Skyhawk arrived. Sent by her Uncle Freddie to come get her. Skyhawk. Kind and caring. And beautiful. With eyes she could joyfully get lost in. He risked his life for her – and brought her to Santa Fe, to dear Freddie, who told her that the best chance they had to find her mom was if she, Lily, became an initiated witch.