Chapter 20 #2
The cat’s golden eyes flashed a luminescent green that was as bright as a glow stick in a pitch-dark room. His jaw unhinged, and he ate the mercury flames in one great swallow, similar to the way he’d consumed the hunger beast that had attacked the garden room. Like a python swallowing a chicken.
Gross, but effective.
With the flames cleared and my vision back to normal, I looked for the necromancers, who’d gone strangely silent. I found them huddled in a far corner of the dusty room, trapped behind a wall of crackling fire. Real fire. The kind that burned things that belonged to this realm.
“Cecil?”
My partner was perched on a dusty wall shelf like a demented Christmas elf, cackling maniacally as he pulled hex bags out of his purple hat and threw them into the fire.
My heroes.
Fennel strolled out of the circle. He burped, sneezed out black smoke, then sat down and began cleaning his paws and face.
He might be a formidable magic wielder, but he was still a cat.
“Where is she?” I yelled at the necromancers. “Where’s Bronwyn?”
Grisette screeched back, “We put the traitor in a place even a necromancer would never go.”
Cecil chucked another hex bag at the sisters, and the fire shot up six feet. As it settled back down, the flames sparkled with the colors of the rainbow. One of his more creative fire spells. Deadly, but pretty.
Geraldine shoved her sister aside. “Make the creature stop, and I’ll tell you where she is.”
“It won’t matter,” Grisette said. “You can’t help her.”
“You’d better hope that’s not true,” I said, “or there’s no reason for me to let you leave here.”
“Shut up, Gris,” Geraldine hissed then to me, “Tell the goblin to stand down, and I’ll tell you where the witch is.”
Uh-oh.
If there was one thing Cecil could not tolerate, it was being mistaken for a sprite, pixie, or goblin. He had serious beef with each of the fae creatures, which I knew because I’d had Kiv Melliza translate one of his many manifestos.
Cecil screamed.
It wasn’t a chitter or a snick, not a rude glare or a filthy gesture, but a loud, piercing cry expressing extreme fury.
The gnome rolled up the right sleeve on his gray robe, smoothed down his snowy beard, and shoved his arm elbow-deep into his purple hat. He grunted and snarled and made snuffling noises. Whatever he was searching for must’ve been somewhere near the bottom of that Mary Poppins bag of a hat.
He began tossing the items he wasn’t looking for behind him, including, yet not limited to: a stack of hex bags, the mini scimitar from earlier, three cell phones he did not have permission to own, a bottle of perfume I’d been looking for since spring, a corked, half-empty jug of a clear liquid that I was pretty sure was moonshine, the weird chain I’d brought back with me from the other realm—
“How’d you fit my chain in there?”
—and a cartoonish blasting machine with a plunger connected by some shaky looking wires to the biggest hex bag I’d ever seen.
It was the size of a twenty-pound bag of potatoes and smelled like ozone and compost. Ivy and some type of fern, bougainvillea branches, and—oh goddess, was that hemlock?—bristled from the crudely-sewn seams.
His head swiveled slowly toward me. I couldn’t see his eyes or his mouth, but his fluffy white eyebrows were pointed down and his nose was a brilliant red, purple, plum gray—the color kept darkening. Whatever shade it was, it conveyed his rage like nothing else.
Except maybe the Wile E. Coyote-style TNT setup.
Speaking of burning, the pain from the mercury flames had died down, but I still felt like I was being baked in a three-hundred-degree oven.
My magic was working overtime to heal me, and it was generating a lot of heat on a desert day in an un-airconditioned house.
Sweat poured into my eyes and down the sides of my face.
“My partner is a gnome not a goblin.” I swiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “I suggest you apologize to him for your mistake. Now.”
“Apologize?” Geraldine looked from Cecil to me, nose scrunched like she’d just smelled something unpleasant. “To a fae?”
“Hold steady, please,” I said, the second she stopped talking. “They have Bronwyn.”
Cecil could be a little quick on the draw when he was pissed, but he liked Bronwyn so I knew he’d listen.
“We aren’t telling you anything, devil,” Grisette cried from where she was shivering against the wall.
Geraldine rolled her eyes. “She’s upstairs. In a salt circle. Sort of.”
“Sister,” Grisette screeched.
“That doesn’t make sense. Why would you put her in a circle? Bronwyn’s not even a little bit demon.”
Grisette sneered. “Like you?”
“Well, yeah. You didn’t have me trapped. I stayed in there because I was too hurt to move. I could’ve escaped at any—” I scowled. “Wait, what did you mean when you said you put her in a place a necromancer can’t go?”
“Not can’t go, would never go.” Grisette, though annoying, was turning out to be a font of information. She was so determined to defeat me that she kept telling me helpful things.
“So, you can go to this place and bring her back. You just don’t want to,” I said.
“That’s right, you demonic—”
“Shut up, Grisette.” Geraldine turned on her sister. “You’re talking too much again. You always talk too much.”
“You’re the one practically pissing your pants with fear. At least I’ve got some guts, Gerry.”
I cleared my throat to get their attention. “So, what’s going to happen is one of you is going to accompany me upstairs and you’re going to bring Bronwyn back from wherever you sent her. The other one’s going to stay here with my partner, the gnome with the itchy plunger finger.”
Both sisters shook their heads. “No. We won’t do it. We don’t care what you threaten us with. We won’t go there.”
I glared at them. “You’ll go where I tell you to go if you want to survive.”
“Not there.”
The fear in the sinister sisters was contagious. I’d suspected that they’d done something devious, like spell Bronwyn unconscious and hide her somewhere in the house. I’d thought they were bluffing about the rest.
But there was no trickery in them now. Only fear.
Suddenly I was very, very worried about my coven sister.
My chest tightened, and a dart of pure agony hit me square in the heart.
The pack bonds? The coven? I tried to breathe through it, but the sensation was so strong it blew me back a step.
I grunted as a fist of pain punched my solar plexus and knocked the wind out of me.
It was as if my body was under someone else’s control.
The necromancer sisters apparently decided this was as good a time as any to try to escape and jumped out from behind Cecil’s fire trap. They bore down on me, Geraldine chanting, the atmosphere in the room thickening with magic.
“Time to die,” Grisette shrieked.
This proved to be a prophetic statement.
Just … not for me.
Cecil reacted to the necromancer sisters’ escape from his fire trap immediately and in the most Cecil way possible.
He shoved down the plunger.