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A stout, middle-aged woman in very conservative dress answered the door and promptly looked them both up and down.
Clara closed her eyes. Eric thought she was going to lose it, but she just sighed and said, “Okay.” “‘Okay?’” said Eric, surprised. “A pack of little monsters just burst into my home like a scene out of an eighties horror movie,” she told him. “I watched Red over there cut one of them down with some kind of Jedi move. If witches is the explanation I’m going to get, then I guess I’ll take it.” “You’re an open-minded woman,” he told her. “And a nightmare with an umbrella. I’m impressed.”
Fire was the magic man’s signature. And his murder weapon of choice.
Poppy looked at Holly. “If Del says so, then it must be true.” Holly nodded. “It always is.”
He followed her gaze, expecting to see someone emerging from the doors, right behind Danni. Instead, his eyes were drawn to a second floor window where firelight flickered. A dark shadow was silhouetted there, a figure cloaked in a hood, watching them.
“It’s revenge. Grandpa defeated him years ago. He always told us that. He came back to settle the score.”
“That’s the problem with revenge,” Eric agreed. “A lot of times, it’s never enough. It’s insatiable.”
see,” said Poppy. “And yet, you don’t have any useful abilities?” “I’m very knowledgeable about British literature.” “Oh,” said Poppy. “So you could bore the magic man to death. That’s good to know.”
While he was optimistic enough to think that most people were inherently good deep down, it seemed like the vast majority of them needed some kind of push to really make that step to reach out and help somebody, especially a stranger.
“You’re a remarkably fast healer.” “How…?” But suddenly Eric remembered something he’d all but forgotten. Something someone said to him once after he first discovered that the world was full of unexplainable and frightening things. He was sitting on the ground, near a gigantic hole inside which he’d very nearly died, suffering from the unthinkable burden of knowledge so powerful and so profound that he thought it might kill him. But he couldn’t remember what that knowledge was. A very small man came and took the knowledge, and all the pain that came with it, and hid it away deep inside him
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“There are all sorts of different kinds of witchcraft. A lot of them, like the Wiccan, is something of a religion. We’re not anchored to any kind of belief system here. We don’t worship anything. We just harness energy. You might say it’s almost a science. Some of those others are way into the ritualistic magic, even dark stuff like blood and sacrifices. Most of it is bullshit, but some of it is as real as ours. I’ve even heard that there are some really scary ones out there, serious black magic, straight from hell kind of stuff. I don’t know how much of it’s true, but it scares the living
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“Oh. You know, now that I’m thinking about it, I might actually know a witch.” “Really?” “Yeah, I’ve heard Mrs. Balm from the museum is into all that pagan stuff.” Karen had catered several fundraising events for the museum. “Mrs. Balm? Isn’t she like eighty years old?” “She is. So if you run into any more strippers, you can just picture Mrs. Balm dancing naked around that bonfire.”
“I still expect most churches would frown on all this,” Eric guessed. “The stupid, superstitious ones,” said Poppy. “You ask me, it’s God who made us what we are. And He did it for a reason.”
In fact, sometimes, when he awoke in the mornings, he had a strange feeling that God had been speaking to him in his dreams…but he could never quite remember it…
She appeared to be in her mid-twenties and was extremely skinny, with a too-pronounced jawline and cheekbones, very short-cropped, blonde hair, fine lips pulled back in an angry grimace and pale, blue eyes full of rage.
Karen was going to start making him wear a helmet when he did these sorts of things.
It was as muscular as the imps were thin, with a great, sagging gut and huge, taloned feet. Its hands looked mostly human, with no visible claws, but they each looked strong enough to easily crush a man’s skull like an egg. Its head was a strange assortment of features, with huge, drooping lips and great, angry eyes, but also a very tiny nose and ears.
The breeze didn’t come from the witches themselves, he realized. It was strange, but it seemed to come from everywhere at once. He didn’t have to be in front of them to feel it. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. It happened too fast. But he did manage to wonder briefly if the warmth he felt was related to the heat that caused the water in the bowl to boil back at the farmhouse.
Eric had to appreciate the cliché of cutting through a dark cemetery to flee a dangerous monster. If he was reading this in a book, he’d call out the author for a stunning lack of originality. Especially since this wasn’t the first time it’d happened to him. There always seemed to be a cemetery.
He dearly hoped to never have to insert his hand inside an ogre ever again.
Alicia Vaine
“You came because you couldn’t say no. There’s a part of you that will always help the people who need you most.” Eric glanced over at her again. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.” She gave him another smile. “I know. That’s the best part.” “What?” “Nothing.” She looked at him for a moment longer and then turned and looked out the window.
“Probably. Alicia’s a nature witch,” explained Holly. “Cierra calls her an eco-witch.” “Eco-witch? You’re kidding.” Holly shrugged. “More often she says eco-bitch, actually… She’s…not the nicest member of the family.” “Really? My skull hadn’t noticed.” “She’s kind of the scary one.” Scary was a good word for her. “Alicia loves being outdoors. This is definitely the kind of place she’d go to hide.” She looked out into the dark woods that loomed before them. “Of course, she’s a lot braver than me…”
“Nobody could see anything in these woods.” “Alicia can. She can see in the dark.” He looked at her, surprised. “You’re kidding. Like…really see in the dark?” “Mm hm. ‘Heightened visibility,’ she calls it. Poppy calls it ‘cat vision.’ It’s a spell Grandpa taught her.
Alicia Vaine. They’d found her. Now they could turn their attention to getting the hell out of these woods.
She was just a plain girl in khaki shorts and a tank top. She was a little younger than Holly, the same age as many of his students, and extremely skinny, with a crooked nose that looked too big for her little face, large, expressive eyes and frizzy, unkempt hair. Although she’d appeared to move through the tree branches with remarkable grace, she looked awkward and clumsy on the ground.
“Her thrust,” Holly informed him. “Hers is one of the most powerful in our family.” “Oh.” “I can use the trees to refocus it,” Alicia added. Eric didn’t pretend to understand any of the things these women could do, but this was especially confusing. “Wait…what?” “I’m a nature witch,” she explained. She stood a little straighter as she said this, as if she were especially proud of this fact. “I can use nature to do lots of things. You see, there’s energy in anything that’s alive—”
“Of course. Short version: I can send it out into the woods and fire it from any of the trees so I don’t have to get too close to my target. The same trick actually amplifies it, making it more powerful.”
A black, hooded figure was walking through the burning woods. His face was hidden. Smoke swirled around him. And where his hands should have been, fire was dripping from his sleeves. The magic man.
He was just starting to feel a little bit like a Hollywood badass when a fourth imp surprised him and sank its vicious little teeth into his left hand. He let out an embarrassingly shrill cry and knocked it to the ground with all the manliness of a sorority girl brushing a spider from her hair. “Hurry!” Holly called back to him.
All he could make out was a pair of massive feet. But they didn’t look like giant’s feet. That was, they didn’t look like the feet of a giant human. They were blocky and thick, lumpy, with only two toes. A strange, hoof-like thing protruded from each heel and its skin was a filthy, mottled gray.
Eric watched the creature as it moved through the flames. A great, gray hand descended from the clouds of smoke, a gruesome thing with three fingers and a strange claw protruding from the bottom of its wrist.
Like the imps in the motel, it was obviously impervious to fire.
recalling the haunting image of the magic man silhouetted against the flames. They were lucky he didn’t kill them all right then and there. In fact, why didn’t he kill them then and there?
The girl was remarkably wise for her age. The next thing she asked was, “What do you think about that?”
“Old witches and wizards?” Holly nodded. “Years ago, there were more of them, and they knew a lot more than we do now.” “A lot of the knowledge was lost over the years,” continued Alicia. “They were forced into hiding in more modern times, some of them hunted.” “And Grandpa knew about all this?” asked Eric. Both girls nodded. “He was one of the best of his age,” said Holly. “But he told us he was nothing compared to those who came before him.” “It was all in his book,” said Alicia. “Book?” “Grandpa’s book,” explained Holly. “It was lost in the fire. Along with most everything else.”
“He was the only one of us who could. He never taught any of us. Not even Del. He said it was dangerous. But he told me once that the original text was incomplete. He was always trying to fill in the missing pieces.”
According to Holly, Charlotte was only a couple years younger than Delphinium. She was sixteen when she was found squatting in an abandoned factory somewhere north of Chicago and the two had been together for twelve years when the magic man forced them to go their separate ways. “She knows things,” Holly said.
“Sometimes she knows things before they happen, but usually it’s more like she just understands things…if that makes any sense…” “It doesn’t,” Eric said. “She can usually find something if it turns up missing,” said Alicia. “She just seems to know where to look for it. Like my necklace one time. It was in the couch cushions.” “And she always knows if something’s upsetting one of us,” added Holly. “Usually better than we do. She’s a good peacekeeper.”
“My bad,” said Eric. “I surprised Cierra, too. She hit me with a baseball bat.” “I believe it,” replied Charlotte. “I’m actually surprised she doesn’t hit people with baseball bats more often.”
The woman lying motionless in the bed was obviously her mother. She had the same small nose, the same rounded chin, the same striking beauty, but she was deathly thin, almost withered. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t respond to the people gathering in the room. Her daughter clung to her hand as if desperately trying to anchor her to this world. Charlotte gave the girl’s shoulders a reassuring squeeze. Her name was Siena Lowe. Her mother’s name was Shondra.
“Something’s not right in that room.” Eric looked down at the woman in the bed. Except for the fact that she looked too young to be on her way out, except for the fact that a young girl was losing her mother too soon, he saw nothing he’d call unusual. “It’s not natural,” Isabelle told him. “She’s not sick. She’s under attack.” “What?” “There’s something in that hospital. Something evil.”
But he was beginning to wonder why there always seemed to be creepy, abandoned structures on these strange journeys. It was as stubbornly reliable as the stupid cemetery and the scary-as-hell villain with the insane, supernatural powers. Charlotte shivered as she looked around.
Charlotte held up her hands. “Hey. I’m a witch. You’ve got an Isabelle in your head. To each his own.”
FEEL IT “What?” YOU CAN’T SEE IT. YOU HAVE TO FEEL IT Eric closed his eyes. For a moment, there was nothing. But then he did begin to feel it. Something was there, hovering right above him, a great, dark mass of…something… It reminded him of every kind of thing that had ever made his skin crawl, from snakes and spiders to scorpions and leeches. It made his stomach roll over. All he wanted to do was turn and flee the room, to get out of this basement as quickly as possible.
A woman was looking back at him in the darkness. He couldn’t see her face, exactly, but she was there, her nose almost touching his. She wasn’t remarkably beautiful, but she was pretty, with blonde hair and a spattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose. He didn’t know how he knew this, since he couldn’t actually see her, but he did. She had two different colored eyes. One was dark brown. The other was a pale blue. “Save me,” she breathed.
“Who was the woman?” WHAT WOMAN? This surprised him. “You didn’t see her?” NO Eric stared at the phone. The woman with the odd eyes… Surely he hadn’t just imagined it. And even if he had, shouldn’t Isabelle still have seen it. She was connected to his thoughts. I SEE HER NOW, she told him. IN YOUR MEMORY. BUT I DIDN’T SEE HER WHILE YOU WERE DREAMING
wasn’t fading from this plane of existence, as those other monsters did. He wondered what that meant.
He could always channel his inner Toxic Avenger, he supposed.
“I got this,” he assured her. But then something bizarre happened. The imp let out a shriek. It dropped to the floor, writhing as if in pain. Its body split open. Smoke poured out of it. Then it began to change. Its arms and legs began to stretch. Its claws grew to the size of carving knives. Its mouth opened wide, splitting its face from ear to ear, and its needle-like teeth grew six inches, transforming its tiny maw into a great, toothy trap. Horns sprouted from its body in strange places. Its eyes bulged even more. When it stood up, it was no longer smoking and it was six feet tall.
