Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter
Thirty-One
Two more of the Brotherhood of St. Brigid were cursed over the next week.
Messengers arrived at the castle to ask for my help around nine o’clock, each time right when I was about to do my evening ritual.
I got my curse-breaking technique down fairly well.
The spell to remove it was actually quite similar to the one I’d put together to try on Lara.
I could have made it simpler and easier on me if I’d used more props, but the church tends to frown on people spray-painting sigils and runes on their nice chapel floors.
Maybe I could get some kind of mat made from some substance that was magically resilient enough to handle multiple infusions of energy.
They came to ask for my help again on Thursday night, and the third victim of the week was Daniel Carpenter.
I handled it.
It wasn’t pretty.
By the time I was done, Daniel’s jaw had locked down on the roll of leather he’d been biting.
His face was blotchy and red, his eyes bloodshot, his body soaked in sweat.
He looked up at me as the awareness of something other than pain showed up in his eyes.
Michael was sitting on the floor, one leg painfully out to one side, supporting his son’s head in his broad, calloused hands.
He put his thumbs on the muscles at the base of Daniel’s jaws and started rubbing them in circles, urging Daniel to relax, until the younger man could spit the leather out.
Then he just bowed his head, murmured a brief prayer of thanks, looked up at me, and said, “And thank you, Harry.”
“Sure,” I said, without much panting. Repeating the same spell over and over is a lot like working out a muscle group with a specific exercise. The more you do it, the easier it gets to do. I sat back, tired but not entirely enervated.
Father Forthill sat on the nearest pew, and about a dozen other members of the Brotherhood were hanging about, visibly angry and armed. He nodded to Dr. Brazell, and the man went to Daniel with a stand and an IV kit and got to work giving him saline, replacing lost fluids.
“All right,” I said. “This is getting ridiculous now.”
“We have to do something,” said one of the Brotherhood guys, younger, taller, more muscular, and apparently angrier than the others. “We can’t just keep putting up with this. This can’t be allowed. These Satanic attacks have to be answered.”
“Probably not literally Satanic in nature,” I said. “There’s a lot of evil out there, kid. Powers and principalities abound.”
“It has to be stopped,” he snarled, the anger focusing on me. He took a step toward me.
In the shadows under the loft, I saw Bear come silently to her feet.
“Carl,” Michael said gently. “Take a deep breath.”
“Look what those bastards did to your own son!” Carl snapped. He pointed an accusing finger at me. “For all you know, he was the one that did it!”
“Carl,” Father Forthill began.
Bear took a step forward. I flipped one of my palms toward her, a silent command to wait.
Carl snarled and slashed his hand at the air. “Well?” he demanded of me. “Witch. Was it you?”
Michael, still holding his exhausted son’s head, gave me a look that pleaded for my patience.
I eyed him, took a deep breath, and stood up slowly, spreading both of my hands at my sides, palms toward Carl. “Carl, I’m as upset by this as anyone.”
“You don’t look it.”
“No. Because I’m setting it aside so that I can think clearly about solutions.”
“There needs to be a solution,” Carl snarled.
“No kidding. Which is why I’m setting my anger aside. And why you should, too.”
“Convenient, the guy solving the problem wants us to not get upset about the problem, so he can keep doing it!”
“Yeah, I like going out in the freezing cold at night in a dangerous city for zero pay instead of staying home in my room and getting sleep. Come on, man. Think.”
Carl stared hard at me. Then he whipped about and stalked out of the chapel. About half of the members of the Brotherhood followed him out.
Bear turned to watch them go. The big Valkyrie’s expression was unreadable.
“This gonna be a problem?” I asked aloud after a moment.
Forthill stared after the departed men for a moment, frowning. “They’re afraid. Perhaps they’re right to be.”
“Sure,” I said. “And when people get scared, they often go kinda nuts. Do irrational things. Sometimes if there isn’t an obvious source of their fear, they pick something and pour it all out on that. Carl there looks like maybe he’s ready to pick anything close enough to pound on.”
Forthill rubbed his cheek with one hand, his expression worried. “I’ll speak to him.”
My mouth twisted with a fraction of the hot bitterness I felt in my stomach. “That’ll work. He looks like a reasoned-discourse kinda guy.”
“Harry,” Michael chided me gently.
I took another breath through my nose, closed my eyes, and exhaled slowly. That had come out a lot harsher than I’d meant it. “Yeah, okay. Might be true, but it wasn’t called for.”
One of the Brotherhood offered me a bottle of water, and I took it gratefully. I drank half of it, thinking.
See, the thing was, Carl wasn’t wrong. That spell was as nasty a little working of black magic as I had ever run across.
Pure nerve pain from every nerve, nonstop.
If the curse wasn’t broken, it could definitely kill someone over the course of days, and there weren’t a whole ton of people in town who could stop it.
I could. Possibly Morty could get an angle on it, if he would be willing to try—his ectomancy was a niche form of magic, but within it he was as powerful as anyone on the White Council, and this spell was spirit-world adjacent.
Maybe the Ordo Lebes, a crew of low-powered practitioners who got a lot done by working in teams, could break the curse, too.
Of course, this was not a chump-level curse.
Which meant that, barring newcomers to town I wasn’t aware of, the list of suspects was the same as the list of potential helpers.
And black magic left…stains. A residue. It could be sensed.
It could be tracked.
And if it built up enough, the Wardens would get wind of it. They’d start prowling Chicago, which was the last thing I needed.
“Michael,” I said quietly. “Where was Daniel when the curse hit him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was at home and got the call to come here.”
“On patrol, after sundown,” Forthill supplied. “Over by McAnally’s.”
My stomach twisted a little.
Over by the bazaar.
Where some of the magical crowd had gotten roughed up by normies.
I traded another look with Michael, whose face had become grimmer and more lined at the words. Michael had been around the block. He knew about magic. And people. He could see it the same way I could.
“We don’t know yet,” I said.
“About anything,” he agreed. “We need to know more. Father, can you be more specific about where the men were when all the attacks happened?”
“I can,” volunteered one of the Brotherhood guys.
“Bear,” I called. “Get the car. I need to check something out.”
—
We stopped at all of the sites where members of the Brotherhood had been attacked. The oldest one barely held a trace of dark magic. It got progressively stronger as we went to the more recent ones. Daniel had collapsed several blocks from McAnally’s, and we went there last.
I got out of the Munstermobile’s passenger side, since Bear had insisted on driving.
She barely fit in the driver’s seat but managed the old hearse smoothly and confidently.
She’d been driving since, well, cars, and had taken all the extreme-driving training she could, so it was just possible she was better at it than me.
We pulled up to the spot where Daniel had been cursed, and I got out, wrapping my duster around me more by reflex than because I needed it against the cold.
I closed my eyes for a moment and focused upon my wizard’s senses, reaching out, opening myself up to the flowing energy of magic in the immediate area.
It was a creepy area. The lights weren’t back yet.
The buildings were almost entirely businesses, and none of them were open late.
Only the lights from the Munstermobile made it possible to navigate safely.
Abandoned cars lined the street. Trash had piled up where the wind had swirled it.
Eerily, there wasn’t a person in sight. A manhole cover had vanished from an entrance to the sewers, and I had a very clear and loud intuition that it hadn’t been done by human beings.
Seemed like an excellent area to find supernatural trouble after dark, which is probably why the Brotherhood had been here in force.
I gave the open manhole as much room as I could while I walked by it and paced down the street until I hit a spot of sidewalk that put up a phantom resistance to my moving forward, like a spot of deep, soft, stinking mud.
Though there wasn’t a physical stench, my body reacted as if there had been, as the nauseating sensation of the residue of black magic washed over me.
Images flickered through my mind as I stood there, as they had at the other points. I caught a flash of Daniel’s voice letting out a hoarse cry, and the perspective of the street shifted in my mind as I felt the sensation of him pitching abruptly over onto his side.
I leaned on my staff to help keep my balance and fought to close down my extraordinary senses.
I took a moment to catch my breath as the sense of dark power faded.
As I had at the other attack points, I took a natural beeswax votive candle out of my duster’s pocket, put it down in the center of the patch of dark energy, drew a chalk circle about it while focusing on my intention, and lit the candle with a murmured spell. Then I stepped back and waited.
The candle flickered to life, yellow and bright, and then after a moment burned down to a low point of purplish flame, exactly as it had at the other locations.
Bear came up beside me and looked at the candle. “Well?” she asked.
“They’re all from the same source,” I said quietly. “Same color, same energy.”
“So, a person,” Bear mused.
“Or the same group of people,” I said, nodding. “Map?”
Bear handed me a paper street map of Chicago we’d been using. I unfolded it, took a pencil out of my pocket, and marked the latest location.
“How far can you throw a curse like this?” Bear asked.
I shook my head. “Not really a specialty of mine,” I replied. “Line of sight would be pretty straightforward.”
“But seems unlikely,” Bear said.
“It does,” I said. “Curses can take a while. If they used a focus like a recent lock of hair or blood from the victim, they’d have been able to hit them from anywhere on the continent, theoretically.”
“Theoretically?”
“In practice, there’s lots of things that get in the way,” I said.
“Degrade how much energy gets through. Running water like rivers and streams. Certain kinds of stone, especially if they’re piled up into mountains.
Barriers of thresholds around homes can get in the way.
Storms, which are generators of energy themselves.
Probably other things I’m not aware of, too. ”
“These sites are all within about a one-mile radius,” she noted.
I looked at the map. “Yeah. They are.”
“So maybe whoever is doing it doesn’t have the kind of strength it takes to project it very far.”
“Maybe,” I said, nodding. “Or maybe they’re using a poppet or simulacrum to create the link.”
“Like a voodoo doll?”
“Exactly like that. You can make one of those with pictures and maybe one of their possessions. Could reach out farther than line of sight, but not as far as if you’d had bits of them in your possession. Weak practitioner, maybe half a mile. Maybe a few more miles if you had help.”
Bear grunted.
I took the map and started estimating distances. After a moment I sighed. “Dammit.”
“What is it?” Bear asked.
I held the map where she could see it and used the end of the pencil to point at a single block I’d circled. “Here’s the block that’s most equidistant from all of the attack sites,” I said.
She frowned and looked at the map and then back up to me. “That tells us something, too, yes?”
“Yes,” I confirmed wearily. I pointed at a corner of the block. “Right there. That’s Bock Ordered Books.”