Without having to be told twice, I swallowed the aspirin and drank as much water as there was in the glass, then I handed it back. Relief didn’t come straight away, but Jared and Delphine were patient enough to wait until I felt like I was ready to talk again. When I was, I opened my eyes and this time I was allowed to sit up, though not without great effort.
Jared watched me like I was a vase that had only just been stuck together after breaking, like he was hoping I wouldn’t fall apart. I didn’t. “I don’t know what happened,” I said, “Marie did something to us, and I don’t know what.”
“Could that other witch be involved?” Delphine asked.
“Other witch?” Jared looked confused.
I remembered I hadn’t told him yet, my encounter with the vampire and the witch in the street hadn’t come up. “Dammit… I was attacked earlier tonight by a vampire, and while I was trying to figure out where it had come from, a witch came and broke the fight up.”
“Broke the fight up? That doesn’t make sense,” Jared said. “Did they hurt you?”
“Tried to, but I don’t hurt easily. Anyway, the vampire and the witch got away, kinda made me think they may have been working together, or at least knew each other.”
“Crap… and you have no idea who it was?”
“None. I don’t think it could’ve been one of ours; we’ve all been working so hard to make New Orleans a better place to live. But you just never know. We have to be careful.”
Nina appeared over Jared’s shoulder looking worried, tired. “She isn’t waking up,” she said. “I’ve tried smelling salts, I tried a sharpie, I even tried to do what I could with magick—she’s still unconscious.”
I fought to stand, pushing away Jared’s attempts at keeping me down, then I walked over to the couch Nicole had been set down on. She was out cold, but she had a pulse, and her skin hadn’t turned grey. I then opened her eyes and checked them, slowly passing my hand over them to see if they’d react to the light in the room. They didn’t.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” Nina said.
“No… we can’t do that,” I said.
“No? Why not?”
“Because whatever’s happened to her has a magickal source… if we take her to a hospital, we may be opening a whole other can of worms. We need to keep her here and supervise her. We woke up. I have no reason to believe she won’t wake up too.”
“And you’re a doctor, now?”
“No, but I’m a writer, and you’d be surprised how much random knowledge writers have about the world.”
Jared walked over to me. “Okay, so… what are the scenarios here? What do you think has happened to her?”
I turned my attention to Nicole again and gently ran my fingertips across her forehead. “Marie did something to us. Nicole was the one leading the ritual, so she’d have been the one to take the brunt of whatever was done to us. I think she’s out cold, like really out cold, but I also think she’ll wake up in a few hours.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Then maybe she’s in a coma... and we’ll have to call her mom.”
A moment of quiet passed between all of us as the information was digested and processed. Jared moved to Nicole’s side, picked her up, and started walking toward the stairs. “I’ll take her to her bedroom,” he said, “Get her settled down.”
I nodded, then turned to Delphine. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I am. I did not feel… anything.”
“That’s because I don’t think our magick got past Marie at all. If the other witch is involved somehow, then the only thing I can think of is that whoever it is put a protective spell around Marie, which means they’re definitely working together.”
“So, the vampires have more witches on their side,” Nina said, “That’s just awesome.”
“They’ve always had witches on their side,” I said, “Anyway, you should probably go home, Nina. You need some rest, and I don’t think there’s anything else you can do for us here.”
“Home? I’m gonna sit and stew for the rest of the night. And tomorrow is gonna be even worse, especially if Nicole doesn’t wake up.”
The words hit me hard in the gut. Nicole doesn’t wake up. I had believe we wouldn’t die during the ritual with all of my conviction, and we hadn’t. Now I had to believe Nicole would wake up in a couple of hours and everything would be back to normal, because the alternative was unthinkable.
“Listen, whether or not she wakes up tomorrow, we still have jobs to do. Go home, get some rest, and tomorrow morning, go back to that butcher’s and stake the place out again. That’ll keep you distracted, at least.”
Nina looked at Delphine, then back at me. “Yeah… maybe…” she said, nodding slowly, “That sounds like a good idea.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. “Go home… but go home quickly, and message me when you get there.”
She nodded, then made her exit from the mansion, leaving Delphine and I alone in the living room. Well, not entirely alone. Gelrot was there, sitting silently atop the fireplace, watching us with his bulging, green eyes. His head playfully tilted to the side when he caught me looking at him, and his ears flopped.
“Monkey witch is okay?” he asked.
“Yeah…” I said, “I’m alright. Thank you.”
Gelrot smiled widely, shut his eyes, and made his neck sway left and right. I guessed that meant he was happy.
“Madison,” Delphine said, stealing my attention.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I fear… perhaps we do not quite understand the gravity of the situation.”
“I do… Marie is working with a witch, a powerful one too. We need to be extra careful.”
“We do, but there is also something else… if she knows what you did, then she will take that as the first sign of aggression toward her since the night of the attack. This could see her mounting another attack on us, and with Nicole incapacitated and Remy… we may not be able to stand her.”
She was right. We’d kicked over the hornet’s nest, and probably shifted our cold war to a full-on war. Ever since the night of the attack, there had been skirmishes between our kind. Sometimes they attack us, sometimes we attack them, but there hadn’t been a full-scale assault in what felt like an entire lifetime. Now that I could feel Marie, perhaps pieces of her, perhaps her whole consciousness, rooting around in the back of my mind, I knew, Delphine was right about this.
It was only a matter of time before Marie launched another attack.
“We have to be ready,” I said, “And for that, we’ll need Jean Luc’s help.”
She shook her head. “Jean Luc has become a recluse. He hides, now, like the others, biding their time until the players in this game are dead of old age.”
“Then we have to stir him up again and make him fight, because if he wants peace in New Orleans, he’s going to have to get bloody again.”
Jared returned, sighing and without Nicole. “She’s about as comfortable as I can make her,” he said.
“We’ll keep an eye on her,” I said.
“No,” Delphine said, “You sleep, I will stay and watch over her. If she wakes, I will tell you.”
“You’ll stay… here?”
She nodded. “If it is not an imposition.”
“No, it’s not. I’m happy for you to stay. I’ll set a bed up in the store room behind my office, you’ll be safe to sleep there when the sun comes up.”
“Thank you… I must, however, feed before I take up my duties.”
I stepped aside. “Yes, go ahead… we’ll be here when you come back.”
Delphine nodded, then moved past me to get to the front door. “I will not be long,” she said.
“Be careful out there,” I called out.
Then she was gone, leaving Jared and in only each other’s company. He walked over to me and took me into his arms, wrapping me up in an embrace that I really needed. I let myself sink into him, sighing like I’d just co
me home from a long day at work that very nearly killed me.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Jared said. “Marie is tough. We knew that.”
“I know… it’s just, if something really bad has happened to Nicole, I’m not going to forgive myself.”
“She knew the risks when she went into this thing. Nina was pretty transparent about the way she felt, too, but she still did it.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I should’ve prepared more, should’ve seen it coming.”
“There was no way you could’ve seen it coming. Please don’t beat yourself up, okay? Nobody else is beating you up, least of all Nicole, so you shouldn’t start.”
I nodded, then moved away from him. “What do we do now?”
“Right now? There’s nothing to do. You just went through an ordeal, I bet you’re tired, probably hungry.”
“All of those things, I just meant after all this… if Nicole doesn’t wake up, like, at all.”
“She’s going to wake up. We just need to have a little faith.”
I headed upstairs with Jared, showered, and got myself into bed, but sleep wasn’t easy to find, not even with Jared next to me and the knowledge that Delphine was in the house. They, as much as they may have wanted to, couldn’t scare away the ghost of Marie that lived behind my eyelids. Every time I closed them, I’d see her horrifying face as it was in the clouds, shifting, roiling, and grinning like she knew a secret. Sometimes, if I watched her long enough, I thought I could hear her speaking to me, but as time went on, I started to think this was more of a recording than an actual psychic projection; the way the sun burns your retinas if you stare at it, even for a few seconds.
When sleep finally came, it was thin and troubled. Occasionally, I’d wake and find myself wanting to wander over to Nicole’s room to check on her, but I knew, if anything happened, Delphine would be the one to wake me and tell me. Instead, I did my best to find sleep again, because I had a feeling the next few days were going to be difficult, especially now that we had the threat of an attack looming over us like a dark shadow, like the sword of Damocles.
We were quickly moving toward a climax, and it was going to get bloody.
CHAPTER NINE
A full day had passed since our attempt at sending Marie and her vampires out of the city, and Nicole still hadn’t woken up. I had called her mother and explained her absence in a way that wouldn’t draw suspicion, but I knew she wouldn’t rest until she discovered the truth if she found out something was amiss—and she would eventually. She was, after all, Nicole’s mother, and very little escaped Nicole’s scrutiny.
That Nicole was still unconscious, though, confirmed what I feared. She wasn’t going to wake up. Though Nina had magically examined her and determined that she was, in fact, alive, whatever had happened to us the other night had hit her way harder than it had hit us, and the very real possibility existed that she was in fact in a coma right now; the problem with that was, a hospital wasn’t going to help—we needed a witch with specialized magick. If we really were worried that Marie had a witch on the inside, though, the last thing I wanted to do was entrust Nicole’s wellbeing to someone outside of our inner circle; someone who may or may not try to finish the job, if given a chance.
We had to wait this out, that was the only thing to do.
But just because Nicole was unconscious didn’t mean that the world stopped turning. Nina had taken my advice and had spent several hours of the day yesterday staking out the butcher’s place for signs of whoever it was that had been buying up large quantities of pig’s blood. Yesterday she had come up empty, but this morning… this morning started with a phone call that sent Jared and I into overdrive.
Together we sped out of the mansion in the middle of the morning and made a mad run to the butcher’s place on Jared’s bike. Nina was under strict orders not to engage but keeping this stranger where she was without revealing herself required her to, at the very least, get a little creative with her stalling tactics.
I held onto Jared’s waist as he weaved his bike around the Garden District of New Orleans. It wasn’t so much traffic you had to worry about down here; it was walking tours. On any given day there could’ve been as many as five or six running, all of them at the same time, taking different routes throughout the district but visiting the same places, only at different times.
Lucky for me I had magick at my fingertips, so as I had little to do but ride shotgun, I kept a quiet incantation going to keep our path as clear as possible of obstacles. I couldn’t help but notice, though, the rapidly darkening sky overhead, or the feel of raindrops falling on my bare arms and neck. Looking up, it was like seeing grey ink disperse in a bowl of water, as clouds raced across, bringing grumbling thunder and falling rain with them.
We made it to the butcher’s shop in four minutes flat, and I was glad that we did. The roads were getting wet fast, and the wind was picking up. As I dismounted from the bike, less than a hundred yards away from the butcher’s, a flash of lightning whipped from the sky and struck a transformer pole creating a blindingly bright explosion. I heard the rumble of thunder, felt it in my chest, and then watched as the transformer began to topple over, then fall to the ground with a smash that sent further sparks flying.
The top of the transformer had fallen in front of the butcher shop’s door, and while nobody had been hurt, people had started screaming and cowering from the still sparking pole.
“Holy shit,” Jared said, “That’s Nina’s idea of stalling?”
“She’s not subtle,” I said, shaking my head. This wasn’t what I had meant when I’d asked her to stall, but if the person we’d come here to find was still in that butcher’s shop, then we had them.
Jared and I ran to the end of the street where the butcher’s shop was. Some people had gathered around the fallen pole, mostly to film the chaos rather than lend a helping hand. By now, though, somebody had called the emergency services; I was sure of it. That meant we only had minutes, maybe one or two.
“I need to get these people out of here,” I said.
“I’m on it,” Jared said, and without skipping a beat, he started walking over to the gathered group of people, fishing his wallet out of his pocket as he went. He then raised the wallet to chest level and aimed it at the people filming, yelling at them like he was a cop and telling them to leave, using his demonic magick to make them believe. Unsurprisingly, the crowd listened to him and started dispersing, clearing a path to the butcher’s shop from where I was standing.
I moved toward it as the rain started hammering down. In the distance I spotted Nina standing by the side of her car, watching events unfold with what looked like a grimace on her face. Judging by the look on her face, I didn’t think she’d wanted to cause as much of a mess as she had, but here we were.
The door to the butcher’s shop opened, despite the flying sparks and occasional explosion coming from the transformer, and someone emerged. It was a woman, and she had a hood up that shielded her face from view, and from the rain. She wore combat boots, black jeans, and had a long, flowing coat that billowed with the wind. Held in both her hands were two large containers filled with liquid that looked black from this distance, but I knew was blood.
The woman took one look at the transformer, then went to turn and go around it, but I called out to her from where I stood.
“Hey!” I yelled, and the woman stopped moving, though her back was already turned.
She said nothing, didn’t turn around to look at me, didn’t even acknowledge my presence except for the fact that she’d stopped when I called.
“Put the blood down,” I called out.
Jared moved in on her but kept a safe distance. Lightning whipped across the sky. Thunder grumbled after.
“You need to leave me alone,” the woman said, her voice floating over to me, rising above the sound of the rain.
“You need to do what I’ve asked,” I said.
I saw Jared inch a littl
e closer, and as he moved, I could sense his own power building up inside of him, his demonic energy gathering strength. The woman suddenly turned her face to look at him, and without so much as a gesture of her hands, Jared went flying and fell flat on his back a few feet away from where he was standing.
The witch.
I wound my arm back, filled my hand with telekinetic might, and hurled a bolt of power at the witch who, moving like a blur, ducked out of its path. The ball of magick struck the side of the butcher’s shop, bursting all its windows; the witch, however, was at least twenty feet away from where she’d been standing, and she was starting to run, but Nina stepped in front of her, and that caused the witch to stop.
Jared fought to get to his feet, and I moved in closer. “There are three of us and only one of you,” I called out, “Put the blood down and turn around. I only want to talk.”
The witch seemed to be considering her options, but her stance was like that of a cat that had been cornered in an alley. Her hackles were up, her back was hunched, and she was slowly stepping away from Nina, but not once did she let go of the containers full of blood in her hands. I watched her attention move to Jared, and then to me, and when her head turned, I caught a glimpse of her face and hair. I didn’t recognize her—had never seen her before in my life. Her hair was like fire, her skin oddly radiant, and her eyes were wide and alert.
Jared, who had managed to get to his feet, shook himself off and decided to approach again. I called out to him, yelled for him to stop, but she spoke in a language I hadn’t heard before, spitting her words at him, and Jared suddenly froze, and fell flat on his side, unconscious.
“Jared!” I yelled and started running toward him, but the witch now turned her attention toward me, her gaze falling upon me like a lightning strike.
“You don’t know when to walk away, do you?” she asked.
“Who are you?” I called out, “And what have you done to Jared?”
“Move away, or I will kill you as well.”
Kill me as well. Had she killed Jared? My heart started thundering inside of my chest. I felt my knees go weak, my breaths shorten. I wanted to reach him, but she was near him—I would’ve had to go past her to get to him, and something about her stance was starting to look a little familiar. She still hadn’t let go of the pig’s blood, either—she was holding onto it like her life depended on it. There was only one way I was going to get to Jared, and the solution wasn’t to go past her; it was to go through her.
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