Unholy

by Bill Bennett

  Dismemberment was her favourite way of dispatching someone – usually with a clean and swift beheading, but she also wasn’t averse to slicing off a limb or even a lowly hand or foot if the victim required a slow and painful death. There was nothing Kritta enjoyed more than seeing someone die, heartbeat by heartbeat, spurt by spurt.

  She loved her knives and had them imported especially from Japan, where they cut the heads off tuna the size of baby whales. She wore these knives on her belt – three on one hip, three on the other, two behind, all in synthetic pouches. She wore them like a gunslinger and she was just as fast. She could whip a knife out and sever a jugular vein before the hapless victim could blink.

  And if a knife wasn’t suitable for the occasion, then Kritta could use one of her two familiars. Bess was a small nuggety woman and had a set of teeth that she’d filed into razor-sharp fangs. She’d also sliced her tongue, so it was forked like a snake. Bess was pugnacious, hot-headed and lethal. With a quick transformational spell from Kritta, she could transmogrify into an attack pit-bull that could leap across a room, crunch through a rib cage and rip out the heart of man in a flash. She also had preternatural hunting and tracking abilities, and could follow a scent for days on end to find some babbling fool who had brazenly thought that he or she could slink away on foot into the wilderness, or into the canyons of a big city. That’s why Kritta had sent her after the girl.

  No one could escape Bess.

  And then there was Andi, Kritta’s favourite. Tall, black, imposing and starkly beautiful, she had the dignity and bearing of a warrior. Her face was covered in raised scarring, like plough lines had been raked through her skin. Her beauty belied her deadliness, though. Kritta, with a simple and swift spell, could shift Andi into a huge golden eagle, with talons like steel-tip spikes and a beak so sharp and powerful it could slice the top off a man’s skull as easy as a can-opener taking the lid off a tin of beans. Many a time Andi had returned to Kritta with a man’s brains gripped in her talons, dripping blood and grey matter.

  Where Andi was really useful to Kritta, though, was her aerial scouting ability – she could take to the skies and find someone at ten thousand feet without the victim being aware of anyone following. She had eyes that could spot a field mouse in an acre of chest-high corn. It was Andi who had found the girl in the cave up on the Chalk Mountains and it was Andi who had skewered that detective’s eyeball with her talon, and returned to her with it stuck there like a Martini olive on a toothpick. Kritta had laughed and laughed when she’d seen that, which only infuriated Bess because there was bitter competition between the two familiars for their host’s affection.

  Standing on a high crag looking out over the desert plains towards the finger of rock, Kritta took out her binoculars and searched for telltale signs of Bess’s progress. Every now and then she glimpsed a fleeting muscled hindquarter, or the shimmer of the dog’s coat as it barrelled through the undergrowth, dodging cacti. She put the glasses down. The dog would be at the rock in no time.

  She thought back on her earlier phone call with her big boss, the Grand Master. She hadn’t told him the full truth. She hadn’t told him she’d picked up a newbie. His name was Kevin Johnstone, KJ for short, and even for Kritta whose predilections veered more to the opposite side of the spectrum, this boy was magnetic. She’d met him at the Mill Valley Market that Saturday morning they’d gone searching for the woman and her daughter. He’d started talking to her and later he’d called to offer his help in tracking down the girl.

  As it turned out Kritta hadn’t needed his help. But then surprisingly he’d shown up at the cave on top of the Chalk Mountains just as they were hauling out The Book of Light – leaning against his Mustang convertible, oozing testosterone from every pore of his muscle-framed body. And when he smiled, well that’s when Kritta nearly buckled. That smile could kill. With a bit of training, she could teach him how.

  He could be useful with the girl, too. If for whatever reason she survived Bess, or escaped, then Kritta could use him to help hunt her down or flush her out. The girl knew him, trusted him; they’d been friends at school. She didn’t know that he’d aligned himself with the Golden Order, so he could win her trust, then nail her. He was definitely an asset to Kritta’s arsenal of weaponry.

  Kevin stepped up onto the rock beside her. She felt his male energy immediately, his hormones, his sex.

  ‘What’s up, babe?’ he said coolly.

  ‘We’re going to follow,’ she said curtly, and turned to jump off the rock and walk swiftly back to the stolen four-wheel drive. She didn’t want to lose power, lose control. She had to keep him at a distance, keep him away from her, because up close, she wasn’t sure what she was capable of doing to him.

  Perhaps if Bess didn’t kill the girl, then she might get KJ to do it for her. Blood him. If he wanted to join Baphomet, what better induction than to kill the Maguire girl. She would still take credit, he’d just do the deed. And he’d be forever in her debt. She smiled at the thought.

  Bess as a pit bull could not only follow a scent, she could also move fast and with agility, and her eyesight was acute. For her, a tiny scrape in the dirt, a branch with a leaf missing, a drop of engine oil on the shoulder of a shadowed rock were like big glaring road signs, pointing the way. Just as Skyhawk’s bike had leapt over ravines and boulders, so too did the muscular dog. Just as Skyhawk had, at times, gunned his machine, so too did Bess break into a run. Where they stopped on a rock for Skyhawk to examine Lily’s wound, Bess sniffed the ground and used her tongue to taste a small drop of poison that had fallen onto stones.

  She knew the girl was suffering, she knew the boy was trying to get her to help and she knew where they were heading – the only place they could head to in this desert wilderness: a tall pillar of rock thrusting up out of the plains in the distance, with a Native American village on top.

  CHAPTER 3

  What to do with the cats?

  She couldn’t kill them. Not fourteen of them. Not even one of them. They were too precious to her. She loved them too much. She couldn’t give them away. No one would take them. Who would take cats from the Hag – the woman in Apartment 1403 whom they thought, rightly, was a witch? And even if one of those cocktail-guzzling, bridge-playing cretinous fools did take a cat or two, they wouldn’t love them like she did. That wasn’t possible.

  The pound was not an option. It would break her heart to take them to the pound. To think that they might be put down if no one adopted them – the thought was just too painful for the Hag to consider. No, she couldn’t get rid of them. But she couldn’t just leave them in her apartment either. She might be away for weeks, months. She might never come back. That was a distinct possibility. Baphomet might track her down and kill her. That was a very distinct possibility. They would see her flight from Chalk Mountain as a betrayal of their strict code of conduct, which it was.

  She couldn’t get Belt to look after them like she usually did when she travelled, because Belt would be coming with her. She was going to need Belt’s protection. Because they would come for her – there was nothing more certain. They would come to deal with her in a grand way, a showy way, a sadistic way that would draw maximum attention.

  The Golden Order of Baphomet, the centuries-old and obsessively secretive organisation of witches based out of Budapest, did not like its master adepts to cut and run, as the Hag had done. But she’d had no intention of waiting around for her execution. Not by two Russian sissies, the Twins, the Golden Order’s elite assassins of choice. That’s why she’d fled before completing her task, which was to capture the Maguire girl. By now the Twins would have killed the girl and most probably that little rat-girl Kritta too. Good, the Hag thought, with a sudden rush of glee. I hope they did it slowly, and made the obnoxious little wretch suffer. She deserved to die. She’d been too ambitious, too vicious for the sake of being vicious.

  Being a witch required a certain dignity that the rat girl lacked, but that she, the Hag, had retai
ned all her life. Anyone could kill a civilian with a butcher’s knife. Or have a pit-bull familiar tear out their throat. But it took skill and elegance to kill someone with sophisticated spellcraft.

  The Hag was nothing if not sophisticated and elegant. To those in the Miami Beach condominium, she was certainly an oddity. But they had no idea she was, or at least she had been, one of the most powerful witches in the world. From her small apartment on the fourteenth floor of this block overlooking the sea, she had coordinated many of the Golden Order’s major activities around the world. But because she’d fled so ingloriously, showing such cowardice, she knew that past triumphs with Baphomet meant nothing. They would track her down, they would find her and they would take delight in killing her. And so she had to hide. She had to hide someplace where they wouldn’t think to look and she had to have protection. That’s why she needed Belt, because her own powers now weren’t what they used to be.

  Belt would be here soon. The Hag liked her. A smart and wily young witch. At eighteen years of age she was dangerous, and beautiful too, which made her even more dangerous. Men, particularly, underestimated women of beauty – the inviting glance, the dazzling smile, the head-turning body that often blinded them to the woman’s true nature, which in Belt’s case was cold clear-eyed evil. But a black heart was not enough. Belt needed to advance her skill set. She was a young witch and not yet mature enough to handle whatever Baphomet might throw at them. The Hag would have to quickly train her up to at least priestess level if she was to be an effective bodyguard, should they come for her.

  Who was she kidding? the Hag thought. Of course they’ll come. It might take them weeks, it might take months, or even years, but the Golden Order would not allow her actions to go unpunished. And when they came, the Hag hoped that Belt would be strong enough and skilful enough to keep her safe.

  Sleep Eternal. That was the only real option. She would put all the cats to sleep with the Sleep Eternal brew. They would stay in a state of suspended animation until she returned. Or if she didn’t, then until hell froze over.

  The Hag went to the kitchen cupboard, looked at a shelf containing several dozen small clay pots, each stoppered with a large cork, each containing a particular brew, all unlabelled. She pulled out one of the pots, took out the cork, sniffed it to make sure she had the right one and then in another cupboard she found a syringe. She filled the syringe with the brew from the pot and, holding the syringe tight, she closed her eyes and intoned a spell. Her yellow eyes opened, skin peeling back like the eyes of an old reptile, and she looked around the room. Several cats lounged on the gold velvet sofa.

  ‘Here, puss puss puss,’ the Hag said in her wrinkled voice as she walked towards them, holding the syringe at the ready.

  By the time Belt arrived, all the cats were in the second bedroom, fast asleep. They would stay like that until the Hag returned and could administer the antidote that would awaken them. If she didn’t return, the cats would stay in their perpetual sleep for decades, even centuries, until the spell was broken.

  Belt had come ready to travel. The Hag had warned her they would be going away and so she’d brought a sports bag containing a couple of changes of clothing, some basic toiletries and cosmetics, her ancestral wand and a small nickel-plated pistol – a birthday gift from her parents.

  Belt was tall, dark-haired, slim and strong. She worked in a hiking store as a sales assistant, but her specialty was climbing and mountaineering. The store had a feature wall where shoppers could climb using foot and hand holds, tethered with a safety rope. Belt would often do demonstrations but she never needed the rope. She was like a spider. She could climb up the wall in a flash, taking the route with the highest grading of difficulty, and then she would crawl across the ceiling clinging upside down, often to the gasps of onlookers way below. Sometimes it seemed she didn’t even need the holds. It was as though she could fix herself to the ceiling with hands and feet made of superglue.

  On weekends and sometimes after work, she would drive out to a national or state park and climb the highest, gnarliest rocks and hills she could find. Her vacations were spent in Oregon or Colorado climbing serious mountains, often with a minimum amount of gear. She astounded those who saw her free-climbing up sheer rock faces with a drop of hundreds of feet below her, always without any ropes or safety gear. Someone took a photo of her free-climbing along the underside of a large rocky ledge, clinging like a gecko, and when Belt came down the photographer pestered her for her name and contact details, so he could include her photos in a magazine article he was writing.

  While talking to her, his camera suddenly became very hot in his hands and he dropped it down the side of a chasm. It took him three weeks to retrieve the camera, which was totally destroyed, but the memory card thankfully was intact. Most of the digital files had somehow become corrupted, though, which was very strange. It was like they’d come in contact with a massive electrical power source. Later he would wonder if there were iron ore rocks in the chasm that had created some kind of powerful magnetic field. That’s the only way he could explain the loss of the images.

  How could he have known that he’d spoken to a highly skilled witch within the Golden Order of Baphomet, an organisation that valued its members’ privacy with an obsessive zeal; and that she’d wrecked his camera with a very simple piece of spellcraft. He was lucky she hadn’t spelled him to fall into the chasm as well.

  The photographer was able to salvage one image though, which made the cover of the nation’s most widely read mountaineering mag, and immediately on publication social media went crazy wanting to know who she was – free-climbing and defying the natural laws of gravity. Belt never went near that mountain again, and quickly learned a set of spells that could wipe clean a person’s memory, should she ever come across someone who recognised her from the photo. Like any true Baphomet witch, she liked to remain invisible in the real world.

  She always wore loose-fitting khaki cargo hiking pants, which disguised the strong body that lay within. Her tech t-shirts, though, showed arms and shoulders that were knotted with muscle, but naturally so. She would often draw the unwanted attention of many a male climber. Those who stared would later complain of migraines for weeks after. Those who made lewd cracks would find that their tongues would soon swell, sometimes so much that they would have difficulty breathing. If anyone got close enough to touch her in any way she considered inappropriate, they would get an electric shock so strong it would tumble them back on their butts and make their teeth ache. ‘Must be static electricity,’ she would say, laughing, before walking off.

  There’s no doubt that Belt had enormous natural talent as a witch. The Hag often commented on just how quickly she picked up new and complex spells, or particular skills such as divining energies or basic telekinesis. It had taken her no time at all to master the underlying principles of Baphomet witchcraft that were often arcane and obtuse and difficult even for more senior witches to comprehend. She was a smart young witch.

  Her parents, two academics at one of Boston’s finest colleges, had adopted her as a baby and had made it their life’s mission to advance Beltane as far up the Baphomet hierarchy as was possible, given that it seemed their own advancement would never go beyond the local coven. They had ambitions for her to be a high priestess, perhaps eventually an adept or even higher.

  That’s why when the Inner Sanctum requested that she be interned with the Hag, her parents didn’t hesitate. There was no one better to learn from, certainly not in North America, even though the famous old witch no longer had the powers she once had. She’d lost them in an epic battle with a supreme white witch many years earlier – the Chalk Witch, as legend had it – and now she was only a shadow of her former glorious self.

  The Hag had never told Belt that the Inner Sanctum had chosen her parents and had given them instructions on her upbringing from the moment they brought her home from the hospital. For some reason, the girl had been marked from birth for greater things w
ithin the Golden Order. She was certainly no ordinary witch. Where her future lay, the Hag didn’t know. And right at the moment, she didn’t care. Because she was commandeering her away from Baphomet for her own selfish purpose, which was to survive; and if needs be, to fight back.

  If Belt had latent powers, then the Hag would find them, develop them and hone them. She would turn her into a combat-level witch. She would make her truly formidable. Someone not to be messed with. It would require an intense period of study and training on the girl’s part, but Belt was up to it, the Hag was certain. At the end of it, the girl would most probably be able to fight off anything that Baphomet sent their way. Except perhaps for Dr Skinless. If they sent Dr Skinless, the Hag may as well curl up and die peacefully right then and there. Because a death at his hands would be horrific beyond words.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Belt asked, as the Hag shuffled out of the second bedroom, dabbing tears from her eyes. She hated having to put her cats to sleep, particularly as she had a very strong feeling she would never be coming back.

  ‘Alaska,’ she said in her rasping voice. ‘I won’t risk public transport. We’re going to travel. Do you know how to travel?’

  The young witch shook her head, and smiled. ‘No – but I’ve heard about it. It sounds completely amazing. You can do it?’

  ‘Of course, I can do it!’ she snapped. And then she said, cooler, ‘Not as well as I used to, I have to admit. But I’ll teach you. It’s all about raising your vibrational energies so that you become one with time and space. Then it’s simple. You can go anywhere, and at any time in the past, in this moment right now, or in the future. Where I can take you, time does not exist. So we will travel together. Would you like that, dear one?’

  Belt’s eyes shone bright with anticipation. ‘That would be so cool, ma’am. Thank you.’