Chapter 6
6
T he pathway across the city line was clear, so we crossed it quickly, urging Skeletor into a rapid trot.
I took note that his body was looking less alive and more skeletal with each passing step. Apparently, there was a limit to his time with me too. “You need to rest?” I patted his neck, and he blew out a long breath and sunk below us, straight into the ground, leaving both Damian and me stumbling a bit. Well, that answered that.
“We aren’t far.” I looked at the street signs, recognizing where we were. “About ten minutes away.”
Damian fell into step beside me. “Kinkly, you want to fly a little higher than us, keep an eye out for that thing?”
“Good idea!” She shot straight up into the air, her flight pattern looking stronger than ever.
Which was good. But also suspicious.
“You’re helping her wings still?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
He nodded. “When she is near me, I can bolster the magic that helps her fly. Make her stronger.”
I wasn’t sure if I liked that, but as long as he didn’t use it as some sort of blackmail, I supposed it was okay.
The rest of the way back to Haven House, my mind worked over the day’s events. Marge was not to be trusted, of course, and she was likely up to no good, but I had shook on a deal with her which now made me nervous. Because the timing on that deal was coming up. Part of me knew it was a terrible idea to work with her and we needed to just cut her out and take care of things on our own. But how to get out of a handshake deal? Did I just say duck it and hope it didn’t come back to bite me in the ass?
Yeah, that was the question.
But that monster…I wasn’t sure how to deal with it on our own.
“Gran thinks she knows what the monster is,” I said as we reached Haven House and my heart kind of stuttered. What if…no, the door wasn’t hanging off its hinges. My friends were not in danger. We’d had the monster in Damian’s house, and then chasing us, it wasn’t going after anyone else in that time period.
Kinkly dropped out of the sky and landed lightly on my shoulder. She drew a breath as if to speak and Damian did the same.
I held my hands up, stopping them. “Before you say anything, I’m going to discuss this with everyone, okay? I know that I haven’t been making the best decisions lately between grieving Crash and that stupid dampening spell. Okay?”
Kinkly blew out a tiny breath and nodded. “Okay then. Let’s talk, see what everyone else thinks. We tell them about that dampening spell and it should slide off them better too, right? They won’t feel so low?”
“According to Gran, yes.” I nodded as we stepped into the house, the faint scent of sage lingering on the air and attaching to my tongue. “What is that smell from?”
Kinkly swung from the end of my ponytail, launching herself into the air. “Penny must be spelling something. That’s what it smells like to me.”
Damian stepped through the doorway and to my left. “No, I don’t think so.” His hand went to his lower back, and he slowly pulled out a curved blade that looked like the top of a reaper’s scythe.
“Jaysus, man! How did you hide that?” I whispered.
“Demon tricks,” he muttered. “Be careful, something is off. The air is charged.”
“Everyone was tired earlier. Maybe they’re sleeping still.” I wrinkled my nose and walked through the house, calling for the others. No one answered. There was nothing on the stove, and the rooms were weirdly empty. I frowned and touched a mark on the wall leading into the kitchen. Black and dented. No claw marks that I could see but….
There was a pan set on the table with a matching dent in it.
“There was a fight,” I whispered, chills sliding over me. “Damian, Kinkly, stick close!” I ran to my room on the main floor and yanked on my leathers, grabbed my knives, and slung my bag over my shoulder. I paused, seeing the bracelet of silver with the blue stones on the night stand—I’d found it in Remy’s pocket when we’d searched him, right after the returning from the land of the dark fae.
I slid it on.
“Robert, we’re going to need you.”
I pulled the fingerbone from my pocket of my jeans and dropped it onto the ground. It never touched, just evolved into a fully formed, functioning skeletal figure, wrapped in hanging cloth that had once been clothes. He had long straggly dark hair that covered his face but allowed for the occasional glimmer of blue eyes. That was new—he’d never had blue eyes before except when for the few times he’d been fully fleshed.
“Nice eyes,” I said.
“Sentinel death magic stronger skeleton friend.” Robert said, speaking more words as a skeleton than I’d ever heard him say before.
Kinkly was flustered, her wings fluttering on rapid speed. “This is terrible. Where are they?”
“Friend. Fights,” Robert grumbled, swaying side to side. He clacked his fingers, as if snapping them.
“Fights. Yes. Were there fights before I called you to me?” I made my way back into the hall. Damian was inspecting the front room.
Kinkly zipped away from me, up the stairs, and then straight back down. “Stuff has been thrown around up there!”
“I told you to stick close!” I yelped as I ran up the stairs, Robert making enough racket to wake the dead, never mind any intruder that might still be there. What if…no, I would not think about it being the monster. There were no gouge marks. That had to mean something.
“I saw movement!” Kinkly shot to her spot on my shoulder as I slowed at the top of the stairs.
The movement turned out to be a stray cat that had found a comfortable spot to curl up on one of the extra beds. “That’s Penny’s bed,” I said as I moved deeper into the room. “Penny? Did you turn yourself into a cat to hide?”
The question wasn’t unwarranted. Penny had turned us all into cats for a mission not all that long ago.
The deep ginger cat curled up tighter, eyes clamped shut as if trying to block out us and the noise we were making. Okay, so not Penny. The window was open, and a tree leaned in close to it—hence the cat making itself at home.
“Here.” Kinkly pointed at footprints on the floor on the other side of the bed. Big footprints.
I crouched beside them. “Who are these from. They’re all muddy, and…” I wrinkled my nose. “Smell a bit swampy.”
My body went cold, clammy. Briny, just like the smell at Stavros’s home and Damian’s place. The feet were huge. Big as what had been chasing us. So even without the gouge marks, I knew the truth.
“The monster has been here.”
Damian dropped to one knee and bent his head close to the footprint. “Smells like brine, where the ocean meets the river. You’re right, it’s the same as the monster’s smell. But no marks in the walls. No dead bodies.”
Kinkly zipped around the room. “There’s nothing on the windowsill either, and there were no marks on the steps leading up to the house.”
My friends were in trouble. Serious, serious trouble.
“GRAN!” I spun around, reaching for my connection to the dead and latching onto it. I did not want to find my friends’ bodies, or anyone else’s for that matter, and luckily I didn’t. What I did find was Gran.
I followed the line of my power that had latched onto her across the hall into what I’d thought was an unused room. The door thumped once before I grabbed the handle and yanked it open. Gran all but fell out of the closet, which was…weird for a ghost.
“Gran, what happened?” I wanted to grab her, hug her tight.
“I don’t know!” Her eyes were wide, and her skin was pale, even for a ghost. “I barely stepped through the house door, and something wrapped around me. It felt like Dr. Mori’s power, and it shoved me up here, into this closet! I could hear fighting, but I couldn’t get out!”
I looked around the room. “Why would he put you here?”
“To protect her?” Damian offered. “To hide her from whoever was attacking the others?”
“But who could harm a ghost?” I shook my head.
“Marge could,” Kinkly said. “Feish came back here on her own. Marge could have followed her, it wouldn’t have been hard.”
Gran shook her head. “No. I didn’t hear Marge. I heard Feish yell about kicking buttocks, and the others fighting, but…I don’t know who they were fighting. There was nothing that I could do about it.”
I looked at Damian. “Any ideas?”
He shook his head. “It’s not demonic. I’d feel that. The briny scent is like the monster, but the destruction here isn’t nearly at the same level as my place.” He frowned. “It doesn’t really fit with anything we’ve seen so far.”
“Breena. Come, I’ve found something!” Kinkly called from downstairs. I pushed to my feet and hurried down the stairs, not caring how much noise I made. Now that I was tuning into things, I could feel that the house was empty.
Kinkly was in the front room where Penny did her spelling, potions, and most of her pacing when she was trying to figure something out. The long table she’d set up with all her ingredients, a mortar and pestle, three sizes of boiling cauldrons, and her various stirring implements had been flipped, scattering everything across the floor, shattering every glass piece.
All that was bad, but it wasn’t what had my attention.
Words had been painted onto the wall behind the table in a smear of what looked like some of Penny’s ingredients. Bits of leaves, ash, and, well, everything had been used to write the words.
Embrace the darkness of death, hell awaits!
We stood there, staring up at the wall. “Subtle.” I put my hands on my hips. “But this doesn’t help us—”
“I recognize her writing,” Gran said, as she joined us, her voice full of sorrow. “That flick at the end of the exclamation point…this is Bramble’s work. She’s been here. That’s who our friends were fighting.”
“Who is Bramble?” Damian asked. I took note that he could hear Gran.
My heart squeezed, and I tore my eyes away from the wall to look at Gran. “You’re saying she took…everyone?”
Gran didn’t look away from the wall, her eyes tracing the words. “I helped train her, Bree. I helped forge her into the weapon she is now. I never thought she would turn to the darkness. Not for one day. Not for one moment. She hid it so well that I never saw it in her.”
I wanted to hug her. A child that she’d helped raise had turned out to be the worst of the worst—a black witch who’d returned to her home to aid the Dark Council, harm her family and her family’s friends. And was most likely the one connected to the monster ravaging the city.
“Gran. We will stop her, we have to, there’s no other option,” I said.
Her lashes fluttered closed, and a ghostly tear tracked down her face. “I know. I am just so very sad that she has turned to this…I love her too, Bree. As I love you, no matter what she’s become.”
I nodded. There was nothing else I could do. “I know, Gran. I know.”
Kinkly flew in front of the wall, eyeing the different parts of the writing. Bits and pieces of so many things.
“Did she actually take everyone?” I looked around the room. “I mean, yes, there was a fight, but this isn’t the full-on destruction we saw in Stavros’s home. Or yours, Damian.”
Damian nodded. “We have to find them.”
“I know we do, but the only clue we have is the mud and that briny smell,” I said. “So we could go out to the swamp, maybe. See what we can find.” Strangely enough, I wasn’t panicking. I was absolutely terrified for my friends, but I had a feeling they weren’t the ones in danger. “Bramble wants something from me, from us, Gran. She wouldn’t do this without a reason.”
How the hell did I know that? Was it a memory floating to the surface? Or just that intuition that came to me every once in a while?
The others looked at me. “What do you mean?” Gran was the first to ask the question.
I did a slow perusal of the room. The mess that had been made, the chaos of it, the message. “ Embrace the darkness, hell awaits ,” I whispered the message under my breath, tasting the words. Over and over, and then a thought hit me. I scrambled over the mixed bits of trashed items to get closer to the words.
I lifted my hand and brushed it over the E of embrace. “Gran, look at the words closer. They’re made with ingredients, right?”
Gran floated next to me and stared up at the wall. “Pickled frog, burnt thyme, red wing dust, charred…yes, these are all ingredients to a spell.”
I turned around. “Damian, hand me that spelling pot.”
Damian tossed me the pot at his feet. “What are you thinking?”
I caught the small cauldron and let out an oof. Dangling it by the handle, I pulled my knife free from the sheath on my hip and used it to scrape the ingredients into the cauldron. “I’m thinking this means something. I don’t know what. But let’s boil it up and see what we get. Maybe it’s a message. Maybe it’s nothing, but at this point I don’t have anything else to go on.”
Each letter was made of something different, that much I’d been right about. As soon as all ingredients had been scraped into the pot, they began to dissolve on their own, turning into a fine, ashy powder.
“Gran, what do you think it is?”
Gran didn’t answer me.
A voice I didn’t recognize answered me. Deep, musical notes, the woman could have made a killing as a phone sex operator.
“I would not touch it. Not if you wish to survive.” She sounded more confident than the secretary at the police station, but the more she spoke, the more I was sure it was the same voice.
We all spun around to see her standing there in the doorway between us and the kitchen, cloaked from head to toe in a deep green velvet. I could not see her eyes or the color of her hair, but I knew it had to be my cousin. Had to be, seeing as she radiated magic and power.
I put a hand on a hip. “Bramble. Yes?”
Her head dipped in my direction. “I am. You look just as you did when I last saw you, Bree, as if the years have not passed.”
Gran floated between us. “She cannot see me, Bree. She has no affinity for the dead, but that does not mean she cannot spell me again into the closet. Be ready to run. You cannot fight her and win.”
Lawd in heaven, this was a pickle gone sour. “What do you want, Bramble? I assume you took my friends for a reason. And I’m going to tell you right now that you’d better not have hurt them, because I will make you regret it.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of laughter that invited you to join in.
I still had the cauldron in one hand and my knife in the other. Kinkly and Damian had set themselves up to either side of me. But I knew Gran was right, if this was the most powerful witch, then there was no way we’d survive a fight with her. We’d barely survived a fight with the first witch with a great deal of help, and Gran had said Bramble was more powerful.
“I want so very many things, cousin. You know, we’re closer than cousins, blood wise.” She sighed but didn’t move, and I just waited for her to continue. “Yes, I have your friends. They are safe with me. For now .” She seemed to be putting extra emphasis on some of her words. “And yes, before you ask, I am working with the Dark Council. The spell they have shown me is powerful, and if it’s not used correctly , the world will fall . Can you believe that they thought Missy could work the spell for them? Absolutely ridonkulous.”
I frowned as she stood there, cloaked and hidden, watching me. It was almost as if she were waiting for me to figure something out. I slowly put my knife away and lowered the cauldron to the floor. “I don’t like games, Bramble, spell it out for me.”
She shook her head slowly. “Nor do I like games. But the Dark Council plays a game, and so must we play in order to win. This city is the board, and we are the pieces on it.” Her fists clenched slightly, and then she flicked out three fingers on her right hand. Just a quick flash, but it tickled a memory in my head that I couldn’t quite reach.
I sighed and shook my head. “That little hand signal means something, and I know it. If my memory hadn’t been wiped, I probably could tell what you want.”
Her laugh sounded more genuine this time, and I got a flash of pale skin and red hair as she tipped her head back. “Gods, Bree, I have missed your sense of humor. I wish I could reverse so many things of what I have done. But I cannot. And I cannot speak plainly. It’s a binding contract that I signed.” She tipped her head to the side and then pinched the bridge of her nose. “Damn it, he’s a nosy beggar. Here he comes, he cannot just let me do what I must.”
He?
The door pushed open, and of all the motherduckers to step in, it had to be Louis. Or Clovis, I suppose. Because he was both of them, depending on the day. The long lanky hair that framed his face looked as greasy as ever. He was a person I’d found easy to underestimate in the past, but while he played a weak necromancer, he was anything but.
Damian, Kinkly, and I all took a few steps back, and Gran stepped between us and Louis and Bramble.
Louis smiled and gave a mocking bow to Bramble. “ Tres bien, Bramble. I wasn’t sure you’d be able to subdue her. She is a spicy one.” He let himself into the house, shut the door with a soft click, and looked around. “Her friends, they put up a fight, oui?”
Bramble nodded. “They did. But they were no match for me or the galloo .”
Gran gasped. “You are mad. I’d hoped I was wrong, that what I was seeing was not true! They cannot be controlled, Bramble, you know this!”
Bramble didn’t react to Gran’s words. Louis just smirked.
I didn’t know what a galloo was, nor did I bother asking—it was clearly the monster we’d run from, the monster that had killed Stavros and Homer and all the supernaturals that were currently in the SPD morgue. We were in deep shit, and I knew we had to get away. But I wasn’t quite sure how to manage it cornered as we were.
Louis grimaced, but I think it was supposed to be a smile. “It is of no matter. Your situation is dire, Breena O’Rylee. I gave you some time—”
“How did you like the time we gave you?” I cut him off and smiled. “In the land of the dark fae? You probably didn’t think we’d be able to lock you in, after you killed Crash, and Remy stabbed me. But look at us go. We watched the gate. And it took you a solid two weeks to escape. Must have been as frustrating as being constipated with no fiber in sight.”
His grimace turned into a snarl and his face contorted into that of Clovis. “You sneaking bitch!”
I let my smile widen. “Liked that, did you? I mean, you didn’t guess it was us?”
Wait, if he didn’t think it was us, who did he think had locked him in? A question for another day.
He growled and took a step toward me, and I…well, I took a step toward him. I was mad enough to take him on, toe to toe. “Right now, Clovis? You want to end this here and now?”
His deep-set eyes widened, but it was Bramble who stepped up. “We do not. You want your friends back? Yes or no? The question is simple and I would think that the answer is equally simple.”
“That’s a stupid question if you knew her at all,” Damian growled.
Bramble turned her head toward Damian and raised her left hand. She held something that looked like a wand, only it wasn’t wood. It was a solid black metallic rod, twisted in the middle and with points at both ends.
One moment Damian was standing next to me, and the next there was a large catfish on the floor, flopping and gasping.
My shock lasted a spit second. “Turn him back, right now!”
“You will do as we say,” Bramble’s voice was calm and smooth. “You will go into hell to retrieve the Blacksmith. This fool here,” she indicated to Louis, “should not have killed him. We need him still for the spell to be completed.”
I dropped to the floor, setting my hands on the flopping catfish who moments before had been Damian. Kinkly whispered in my ear. “We were looking for Crash, anyway, say yes. Say yes before Damian is killed!”
She was right, I couldn’t think of any reason not to agree. They weren’t the only ones who needed him. “Yes. Now turn him back!”
Bramble lifted her strange wand and rolled her wrist, flicking the wand. I didn’t see the magic, but I felt it on my skin as it passed over me and wrapped around the catfish.
I blinked, and Damian was on the floor, gasping for air. I kept a hand on his back, steadying him. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’ve been turned into worse by my shadow.” Damian grumbled, but his voice was shaking as he spoke. I looked up at Bramble and Louis. Clovis. Whoever the hell he was. I was shaking too, but it wasn’t from fear.
I was as pissed as a hen in a thunderstorm.
My fists tightened. “Why would you try and kill me then with the coffee?”
Bramble laughed. “It wouldn’t have killed you. It would have forced you to come to me for help. It didn’t work. So, I took your friends instead.”
Son of a donkey, this bitch was damn crafty.
Teeth all but grinding, I managed to speak. “You’ve got what you want. Are you going to tell me how to get into hell? That would be helpful seeing as I’m doing your dirty work.”
Louis smiled. “Ah, oui , that is a rather sticky bit. We don’t know how to get there either—not really. Which means you’d better hurry. Because we need the blacksmith back by midnight on the first full moon of the month.”
Bramble sighed and her hand swept up under her cloak toward her face. I knew without seeing that she was pinching the bridge of her nose, a move that I knew without a doubt. “Why can’t you just tell her the actual date? Saturday night. We need him back by Saturday night.”
Kinkly hung under my hair at the back of my neck. “That only gives us two days.”
Two days to find the way into hell, get Crash, and bring him home? Considering we’d been trying for three weeks with no success; our odds didn’t seem very good. Still, I’d stack them in our favor as best I could.
I stood back up and faced not Louis, but Bramble. Because despite Louis’s position in the Dark Council, I knew who was in charge here.
And it sure as duck wasn’t him. At least, that’s what I thought.
“What if I can’t? What if I get into hell but can’t get him out? I could end up being stuck there too. I want my friends that you’ve taken released if that happens. I want the gallop-thing out of Savannah.” I held out my hands. “I’ll do what you want, let me assure you of that, but I want to know that if I fail—”
“There can be no failure,” Bramble said softly. “If you fail, your friends die. It is that simple.” She turned away, her cloak swirling out around her, revealing a flash of leather-clad legs and knee-high boots that looked suspiciously like they’d been made by Gerry.
Louis stepped ahead of her, opening the door, and ushering her out. He looked over his shoulder. “Good luck. You will need it for certain.”
Good luck? He shut the door and it took all I had not to throw the entire cauldron of powder at it. Damian stayed where he was on the floor, leaning his head in one hand. “I have not felt power like that in a long time,” he said at last. “Her magic is unreal in its strength, more like that of a full coven than of a single witch.”
Great, just what I wanted to hear. I ran to the side window and looked out, but Bramble and Louis were already gone. Vanished as if into thin air.
Gran ghosted to my side. “Bree. What are we going to do? The path is clear, and while I can admit that I was wrong, you still need a proper direction. How to find your way into hell, that is.”
None of that was what I was focused on though.
No.
I was focused on the clown that stood on the sidewalk, grinning as he stared up at the house, a large red balloon floating over his head, the string wrapped tightly around one of his oversized white gloves.
Jaysus running nude on a beach, this was the last thing I needed.