Chapter 9
9
“T hat doesn’t make any sense!” I yelped, mostly because it was really, really bad if Bramble knew about the spells that Gran had hidden here. Because…hang on, confusion chased the fear as quick as a hound on a hare. “If she knew the spells were here and she’s working with the Dark Council, why would she not just give this to them? That doesn’t seem right, Gran. They killed you because they wanted to get to this place.”
Gran paced the small space. “I know, you’re right, but…I think…it’s confusing because I have a kernel of memory of having been followed here once. Only…she could have erased it all if she’d wanted to. There is just one missing piece from that night.” Gran’s eyes swept around the room. “You must burn all of this, quickly. No matter what, it needs to be done.”
I dug into my hip bag and pulled out a lighter that read “Hunk-O-Mania –Shaking that D since 1993” and clicked the striker. It lit right away, and I leaned over and set it to the papers under the shelving unit I’d downed.
I should have been more careful with what I was lighting, should have thought this move through. The paper was beyond tinder dry. The shelving unit billowed up in flames that mimicked the rainbow in about 2.3 seconds.
“Jaysus!” I bellowed and fell backward, against the far wall. As far from the door as I could be. Which, of course, now had a series of flames swelling up between me and escape.
There was not a lot of time to consider the best route. I had to move and move as fast as my aching knees would allow me to go. I jammed the burgundy ribbon-wrapped paper into my hip bag, took a step back, and then ran and leapt through the flames. I closed my eyes as I went through, covering my face with my arms.
There was a distinct smell of singed hair, but my leathers held off the worst of the heat. I hit the ground, stumbled a bit across the loose papers scattered everywhere, and then blasted through the door, into the rain, and then splatted into the mud that had built up even in the short time I’d been in the shack.
The rain was coming in sheets, sideways and with the force of a baby hurricane as it built up speed.
I spun on my ass to see Robert leap out after me, collapsing as if whatever magical strings held him up had been cut as he went through the flames. I scooted through the mud and scooped up the finger bone, tucking Robert back into my bag.
The shack erupted into flames with a boom that rivalled the thunder above my head.
“Hurry, back to the car.” Gran shooed at me, flapping her hands and her skirt to move me along.
I pulled myself out of the muck and slogged back to the fancy little sports car. It came into view, and I grinned, thinking about how much Corb was going to hate me climbing in, covered in mud and stinking like a slough. Worse even than the smell of the river, for certain.
The rain and the wind blocked much of what I could see and hear until I was almost on top of the car.
A bellow cut through a lull in the storm.
What the hell now?
I ran toward the cries. All of the car doors were open, and I could see through to the other side, and the figures doing battle.
Corb and Damian were locked in a fight with another man who was covered in hair, and for a moment I thought maybe it was Eric in his bigfoot form. But no, this guy was big, bigger than Ivan the Red even. And he was wearing a clown suit.
Shit, they’d found me.
“Stop!” I screamed as I came around the side of the car, putting as much power into my words as I could.
The newcomer’s head swiveled toward me, wig pulled back, rat nose sticking through the white paint all over his face. “Kill you now!”
He lurched away from the guys and came straight at me. The energy around him was hot and rolled off his body in waves.
“No!” Damian roared. “I am here!”
“No.” I held up a hand. “I’ll deal with him.”
The rat-faced boogeyman ran for me, but I held my ground, making myself stare into his eyes. At the last second, I spun to the side, rolled under the bogyman’s outstretched hands, and snapped my fist as hard as I could into his side.
“OW!” I howled and pulled back; my fingers numb from the blow. “Are you made of cement?”
The rat face’s white paint was streaked, running, and dripping off the bits of fur that were showing through. “Dead now.”
“Well, I’ve killed a few of you to be honest. You want to be added to that list? Why don’t you just tell your fang faced boss to duck right off?” I danced to the side, missing another blow from the beast simply because I’d slipped in the mud and the slip had put me out of reach.
Go me.
“Bree! Get in the damn car!” Corb yelled. At any other time, I would have flipped him off on principal. Honestly, though, it wasn’t a bad suggestion.
Slipping and sliding, I did my best to run back to the car. The upside was the rat-faced boogeyman was in no better condition than I was in terms of making good speed.
I fell into the car and slammed the door as my new friend hit the side of the vehicle.
“Everyone here?” I said as Corb revved the engine and spun out, drifting in a full circle that effectively smashed the boogeyman.
“Yes, he jumped us right as we got back to the car.” Damian shook his head. “Kinkly, you okay?”
She poked her head out of his shirt, her face washed clean of color. The boogeymen affected her badly, and I could see she was shaking. “You got any more fairy honey?” I directed my question at Corb, but it was Suzy who pulled out a small flask.
“Here.” She tipped it up for Kinkly to take a sip.
“Thanks,” Kinkly murmured. “They are awful. I just can’t deal with the fear they bring to me.”
I nodded my agreement. “They are pretty shitty. But it’s all good, we got the paper.” I dug into my hip bag and pulled out the burgundy ribbon-wrapped parchment. “Ready?”
“Open it,” Gran said from her position on the middle console. “Before anything else happens.”
“I’m with Celia on that,” Damian said. “Let’s figure out how to stop the galloo.”
I pulled the ribbon, and the knot unfurled, the paper crinkling but not falling apart as I spread it open carefully. Of course, both Damian and I had forgotten the biggest issue. Neither of us read demonic.
“I can’t read this,” I said. I mouthed the words over and over. Pulling a notebook and pen out of my hip bag, I wrote the words down quickly, because even as we sat there, the moisture in the air seemed to be affecting the paper. The fibers were turning mushy, gumming up against my fingers as I worked.
“Ad gallum pellendum, magnae fortitudinis daemon utendum est. Daemon magia est omne quot franget alica tenentem gallum simul,” I read the words, stumbling over the strangeness of them, feeling a weightiness to them.
Damian sucked in a sharp breath. “I should have thought of this. Hearing you read them out loud, even poorly and with terrible pronunciation—I mean, you brutalized them—”
“Get to the point.” I twisted around to give him a look.
“I can understand what you’re saying,” he said.
Corb slowed the car down and pulled over to the side of the dirt track. “And?”
“Basically.” Damian frowned. “Wait, say it again?”
I obliged, he grimaced, and he gave a quick nod. “Okay, we need a powerful demon, with powerful magic. That’s what will break the spell holding the galloo together. There aren’t many demons that have magic of any kind, though. Strong enough to break a witch’s spell.”
I slumped into my seat and looked at Damian in the rear-view mirror. “Let me guess. Toltza is one of them.”
The way his face tightened was all the confirmation I needed. Everything in the last twenty-four hours had been pushing us toward Toltza. The portal to hell. Stavros’s shadow. Marge. The ability to stop the galloo. No matter how bad this bad ass demon was, we needed his help.
“Okay, so we have to go to Toltza,” I said. “Unless there is another option?”
I looked around the car. No one jumped up and said they had a different solution.
“You can direct us to him, Damian?”
“I don’t want to, but yeah…I guess I will have to, but it’s not going to be easy.” He slumped in the back seat.
Corb rolled his window down a crack, fresh air flowing in through the car, taking the steam off the interior of the windows. “What do you mean by that? I thought he was here too, on Ossabaw?”
Damian rubbed his hands over his face before he spoke. “Look, he’s miserable to other demons. He won’t allow more than one person or demon to approach him at a time. So, I will go in first and beg or bargain with him. In theory, he should be more willing to talk to me. I hope.”
Corb drove, and I was impressed that he didn’t bitch once about the smell of his passengers. We were covered in muck, soaked through, and it was seeping into the seats. And not one complaint.
Mind you, I noticed there were several occasions when he’d open his mouth, Suzy would bump the back of his seat, and his mouth would shut with an audible click.
I looked over my shoulder. “You have something on Corb, don’t you?”
Suzy smiled and shrugged. “Maybe.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Corb’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. Interesting, I couldn’t wait to hear the full story. Maybe once we got all this taken care of, we’d all go on vacation somewhere warm and relaxing and swap stories.
We’d deserve a break if we survived all that was being thrown at us.
I leaned back in my seat and stared out the windshield, the rain sluicing across it even with the wipers going full speed.
The water lines seemed to form a pattern, one that was moving against the flow of the wind and rain. Frowning, I stared at the image, then realized it was Crash.
There he was, in the rain, his eyes locking on mine, his mouth moving, trying to tell me something. The bracelet on my wrist tingled, the blue stones flashing, almost like Crash’s eyes.
I leaned forward and pressed my fingers against the windshield, and his voice was right there in my ear, whispering.
“Leave me, Bree. Nothing is as it seems. I love you, too much to let you get hurt trying to save me.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m on this path, and I am seeing it through.”
The others in the car were all looking at me, the weight of their gazes a palpable thing, but I didn’t care. This was Crash and he was so close. I flexed my fingers as if I could reach through and grab hold of him.
“I need you to trust me,” I said. “I know that you’ve been around a long, long time and you’ve seen a great deal, but I need you to trust me. Trust me that I am following the right path and that it will bring me to you.”
The image in the rain faded, but his voice was still there, fading but audible.
“I trust you. I trust you, Bree, with all that I am.”
I smiled and he was gone, both image and voice. I didn’t care though. He trusted that I would find him, and that I was capable of dealing with the inevitable challenges along the way. And that meant everything to me.
I leaned back in my seat. “How far are we from Toltza?”
Damian cleared his throat. “We’re here. See that swamp puddle thing up ahead? That’s his.”
Corb slowed the car and turned the engine off. “Not exactly what I’d call home sweet home.”
Kinkly sniffed. “You don’t deserve even that, Corb.”
His face tightened but he didn’t argue with her.
I don’t know what I expected when we reached Toltza. Maybe another shack, maybe a hanging tree, maybe a house. Not an oversized puddle in the middle of the island. “Really? That’s it?”
“Yes, wait for me here.” Damian let himself out of the car and strode toward the puddle with his hands raised. Around the edges of the water were bushes and a few wild pigs shot out, squealing for all they were worth. It was only then I realized how much the light had changed. We were nearing morning, the darkness of the night fading. And we were down to only one day left to get Crash back.
“Do you think that Toltza will help?” Kinkly fluttered over to the back of my seat.
It was the question of the day—or night if you prefer. “I don’t know. I don’t know what we’ll do if he won’t. We just keep going, I guess.”
Movement caught my attention and I leaned to the side a bit to try and see around Damian, because it looked like the puddle was moving.
“Holy shit, it’s not a puddle. That blob of darkness on the ground is the demon,” I breathed out as the ‘puddle’ rose up, liquid but slowly taking a humanoid shape. Toltza hovered over Damian by a good foot, maybe more.
We couldn’t hear what Damian said, but apparently Toltza didn’t like it, because in the blink of an eye, Damian was picked up and thrown back toward the car. He hit the roof and rolled off with a heavy thud.
“Jaysus!” I was out the door in a flash. I bent and checked Damian. “Are you okay?”
He groaned. “It’s no good, he won’t help.”
I trust you.
Crash was waiting on me to make this all happen.
“Son of a crazy bitch, he’s going to help us if I have to stuff him into a jar.” I stalked toward the still hovering and liquid-looking form of Toltza. I wasn’t going into this alone. I dug Robert’s finger bone out of my bag and dropped him onto the ground. “Going to need back up, Robert. Real back up.”
I blew out a slow breath and reached for the part of my magic that was connected to the dead, pushing it carefully into Robert. As he stood, his form became solid, his hair pulled back in a dark ponytail, blue eyes staring at me from under raised eyebrows.
“Bree. You’re getting better at this.”
I shrugged. “Practice. I know you won’t believe this, but I have to make a deal with a demon. Seeing as you’ve stood by me with this kind of thing before…”
“I’m with you, Bree.” His voice was soft, and he gave me a wink. He reached over and took my hand, giving my fingers a squeeze. “I’ve got your back, my friend.”
I squeezed his fingers back and then let him go so I could face the demon.
“Hey!” I snapped my fingers at Toltza. “You know, you can’t go throwing people around like that! It’s rude.”
Laughter rumbled out of the liquid demon. “I just did. And I’ll do it again if it pleases me.”
“Yeah, but you can’t. Not without repercussions.” I stopped about ten feet from Toltza, Robert flanking me, and got a good, close-up look at the form.
Within the liquid were bits and pieces of bones, animal skulls, teeth, a few rocks, and there was something else in there.
Bits of parchment, just like what we’d left back at the shack.
“You’ve been eating all that magic, haven’t you? Before or after I burned it all down?”
“Clever, very clever,” Toltza swirled, as if doing a pirouette. “A feast like that can’t be left to rot. I snacked on it here and there, sneaking through the crevices of the floor. But you found one bit of magic that I’ve never seen, didn’t you? I smell it in your bag.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I need to know if I can hire you.”
Robert jerked as if I’d slapped him hard on the ass. “Hire him?”
“Hire me?” Toltza tipped his head toward me, and the fear he caused was knee buckling. I saw my death in this one, saw the total chaos of my life unravelling if he desired it. Sweat broke out over my body despite the cool air.
I clamped my legs together, feeling like the fear would make me pee myself.
“We need—”
“No,” he barked. “You need. Not we. You need me. You need me to help you stop the galloo. You need me to tell you how to enter hell. I know. I pay attention. You think that all your questions, all your movements are unknown to me? You are a fool then if you think Toltza does not know. I will not help you.”
Robert stepped closer to me. “There is one thing that every demon wants, Bree. Even this one.”
A body.
Robert was right, a body was the offering. I steeled myself. “I’ll give you a body, if you help us.”
Damian let out a yell behind us. “No! Bree, don’t do it!”
I locked my knees. “What do you say to that, Toltza? You help us stop the galloo, give me the location to the entrance to hell, and I’ll give you a body. For a time.”
The liquid form sloshed and turned in on itself. “What body?”
Robert stepped forward, but I wasn’t doing that to my friend.
“Mine.”