Chapter Four
Lydia
Indie and I searched for her nieces, but to no avail.
Marty humored us and even took us to the modest, one-story, mid-century modern home the sisters had moved into, but they weren’t there. I would have thought we’d just imagined them if Roy hadn’t confirmed that he remembered sending Shelby to wait on them. But where they’d come from and where they’d gone was a complete mystery. Not to mention the reasons why Taliyah and Marty had assumed they were just ordinary mundanes. Maybe Marty might not have picked up on their witch magic, but Taliyah certainly should have.
After hours of searching the streets of Haven Hollow, we were no closer to an answer and Indie finally agreed to let us return home. Angelo was in a particularly foul temper after being forced to shut Occult Oddities early to accommodate this completely futile quest. What was even stranger was the absolute sense of jealousy wafting off him—it was palpable. And that on its own was strange because Angelo had the ability to detect if I’d had sex with Marty—he was able to somehow smell or scent it, as I understood. So, he had to have clearly known we hadn’t done anything like that and yet, he was acting like a jealous boyfriend. Regardless, I was in no mood to deal with him after the day I’d had, so I let him eat dinner by his lonesome and then went straight to bed.
That was a mistake.
Because as soon as I closed my eyes, Indie’s nightmares projected into my head like a drive-in screen. Usually, the nightmares consisted of the same couple of reruns seemingly on an endless loop—reruns with the overly sensitive parts blipped out, in order to try to keep some of her past to herself. Tonight, though, her careful control had slipped, and I found myself somewhere new.
Not only that, but I wasn’t myself. I was Indie, when she still had a body, and we were freezing our asses off.
“Damn it, Susan, open the door,” I muttered. “I just had a pedicure, and it would be a shame to lose any of my toes.”
There wasn’t an answer, of course. My feet felt like blocks of ice. The boots didn’t have as much insulation as they claimed. If I managed to finish this task for Thayer, I was going to sue the company that made them. At least the wool jacket lived up to its promises. I’d popped the collar on the way up, and it dutifully kept the wind off the back of my head.
I wrapped my arms more tightly around myself as I waited. The cabin’s overhang blotted out most of the waning light, leaving me in semi-darkness. The hills were a grayish purple on the horizon, dusted with vibrant hues at the very top from the setting sun. Fir trees stood sentinel all around Susan’s place. At least a few of them would be etched with wards and protection runes. If she was home, she knew I was coming long before I arrived on her porch.
I raised a fist and knocked again. My foot started up an insistent tapping on the time-worn wooden planks. They shifted beneath my feet, letting out an exhausted groan in protest. Another cue for Susan to open the door. She had to know I was out here.
“Hello?” I called, rapping on the door hard enough that my knuckles ached. The wreath on her door shuddered under the onslaught. It was either preemptive of this Yule, or a holdover from the last. “I know you’re here, Susan. Let me in before I start turning blue.” No answer. I knocked a little harder. “Hello?”
When the silence persisted, I made an executive decision and drew in my power. She’d just have to forgive me for breaking her locks. If she’d been prompt, maybe she could have avoided the property damage. But she wasn’t prompt, so I muttered a word. A spark leaped from my outstretched hand. There was a puff of acrid smoke, and then the door swung inward.
I took a cautious step forward, peering around the corner. No sign of Susan or her familiar. That was... odd. The door did a lot of creaking as I opened it, but the floppy-eared bunny didn’t hop down the hall. And that was even weirder, because Susan’s familiar loved attention and attention from me in particular.
The lights were on inside. If Susan was out, she would have turned them off—she was conscientious like that. The red leather couches were exactly as out of place as I remembered. A cup of coffee—freshly made and steaming—was sitting on the end table, perched on a coaster next to an open magazine. But the air didn’t smell like coffee; it smelled like incense and chalk dust and ozone. Which, of course, meant magic, and probably not the good kind.
My heart thumped unevenly. Something was very wrong here. I whirled toward the door when I heard footsteps, already gathering power for a hex. A witch’s home is a fantastic place for a magic duel if you can swing it. Magic was steeped in the walls, the floors, the furniture—and the more years you lived in a place, the more magic you had to draw from.
A woman rounded the corner, a corona of golden light wreathing her head. There was enough power crackling in the air around her to make my eyes itch. She’d always been a powder keg of potential, too powerful for her own good. It had gotten her in trouble over the years and because she was the closest thing I had to a friend, I’d come along for the ride. We were neck-deep in murky water now, and had been for a while. I was still clinging to her assurances—her beliefs that we hadn’t made a huge, huge mistake. Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, I was beginning to wonder if this partnership with Murrain and his people had been a good idea.
Actually, scratch that, I knew it wasn’t a good idea.
Witches manifest their ability to cast when they’re young. Everyone is different, but many of us use our hands to cast, adopting a unique twist or flick that just feels right. I’d heard of witches who used their feet, stomping, tapping, or even kicking. Then you got the odd ones—witches who used things like noses. Elbows. Lips. But Susan was the only one I’d ever heard of who used her eyes. It made her hell on wheels in a fight. No one knew how to defend themselves because they couldn’t guess which look was innocent and which one wasn’t.
“Susan?” I asked, easing down a fraction, letting the power I’d gathered dribble through my fingers.
Now that I knew she was here, I was actually a little miffed. Why the spell hadn’t she come to the front door? But a glance down at her fingers gave me the answer I was looking for. They were stained black as though she’d dipped them into an inkwell. I knew better. She’d been rendering—and that was a complex process. So complex that she might not have heard me at the front door, or she’d just ignored the knocking if she had. One slip of concentration at the wrong time could be disastrous.
She blinked at me in surprise, and the lights winked out, leaving me squinting past the spots she’d left in my vision.
“Indigo. When did you get here?”
“Just now.”
“You should have knocked. I didn’t realize you were here until my wards started blaring.”
“I did knock. I spent the last ten minutes on your porch. I let myself in to avoid frostbite. Why do you have to live in this goddess-forsaken place, anyway?”
“It’s remote,” she answered shortly. “Fewer people around means I’m less likely to be caught.”
“Right.”
“You know they’ll kill us if they catch us at this.”
My stomach churned.
Maybe they should kill us, a traitorous voice in my head muttered. What we’re doing is vile.
But I didn’t say as much out loud. I went with something topical instead.
“What did Murrain send you this time?”
“A Grimm. That’s why it’s even darker stuff than usual. I’ll be scrubbing this out of my cuticles for weeks. Trust me, Indigo, as a scout, you got the better end of the bargain. If you were any good at rendering magic, I’d make you suffer with me.”
I didn’t agree with her. I might not have been the one directly doing the killing, but I had a hand in the evil, all the same. I was the first point of contact—the one scoping out targets and handing their names to the middleman, Thayer. I was the one who decided who would be drained of their magic—something which would eventually kill them. And being the first point of contact in this horrible game was becoming more difficult with each passing month. I wanted to quit, but that would mean leaving Susan behind and risking my employer’s wrath. I needed to find my mother’s grimoire if I stood any chance of escaping the hole I’d dug for myself by agreeing to work with Murrain in the first place. My mother had been the most powerful witch I’d ever known. If there was a spell to make Susan and me disappear to a place where he couldn’t find us, it would be in her book of shadows.
“I didn’t report a Grimm,” I said, pointing out the obvious.
“Lucky find then I guess you could say,” Susan answered with an unnerving smile. I’d begun to wonder about her sanity of late. “You hardly ever see them outside their graveyards, and fewer and fewer boneyards have one these days.”
“Right...”
She gave me a weary smile, a soft expression that was completely at odds with the evidence of cruelty staining her hands. “It’s good to see you. It’s been a while.”
“It’s nice to see you too,” I said, leaning on one of the couches. The leather had been peeled away in places by a misbehaving rabbit. I picked at it to avoid meeting her eyes. Because the truth was, I didn’t think it was an honest sentiment anymore. I blamed her for getting me into this mess and worse, being fine with the outcome. The entry-level stuff had been bad, but what we were doing now was simply profane. The goddess would never forgive us.
Something growled nearby. There was a blade in my hand before I could even think about it. It wasn’t large, but it didn’t have to be. I’d paid a premium for this alchemist’s knife, and it hadn’t disappointed me yet. The metal was adaptive and reacted to the blood of its victim, transforming itself into an alloy best suited for the job. Silver, cold iron, copper, mundane steel slicked with poison or peppered with salt. In this line of work, I needed this blade and then some. Many of the things we hunted would hunt us right back.
“Is the Grimm still living?” I asked, though I could guess the answer from the stains on her fingers.
“Obviously not. It can’t render until it’s dead. The corpse is out back.”
“Was it alone in that graveyard?” I asked as the growling grew louder.
“Apparently not.” She looked past me to the woods outside. “It’s too much to hope that they’re just timber wolves.”
“Damn right.”
The growling grew louder and more insistent. I crept toward the hallway, one creaking step at a time, gathering power into my hands once more.
“Indigo, wait.”
I didn’t. I pressed my back against the wall next to the hall door and listened. The growling was so loud now that it vibrated the wallpaper rubbing against my elbow and cheek.
Then, very suddenly, it stopped. It was like a heater suddenly cutting out. The house went quiet. Susan walked to the other side of the door, the light of her power casting long shadows over the room. Her shadow was short. I had at least a head on her, perhaps two. She was actually the tiniest witch I’d ever met, which just went to show you that you couldn’t judge a witch by appearance alone. Every ounce of her was more powerful than mine. I might have the height, the bust, and the waistline, but in pure power, she had me beat. She would have made a fantastic Head Witch one day if we hadn’t fallen in with bad company.
I was about to make an asinine comment about false alarms and ghosts when it happened. There was a truly enormous cracking sound, and the wall near me simply caved in on itself and a furry shape leaped through the gap. I caught a glimpse of it in my periphery before it plowed into me from behind.
Pain was the first thing that registered. For a moment, it was the only thing. Blunt claws, heat, and jagged teeth chewing on one leg with intent. If I hadn’t thrown myself away on instinct, it would have latched onto my shoulder or neck instead, and there went Indigo Hallewell.
I kicked out wildly and scored a hit on the thing’s muzzle. It let out a canine yelp and retreated a step. I smelled smoke, ozone, and burnt meat. That last bit was probably me, and the adrenaline was preventing me from feeling how badly I was hurt. I didn’t look down. If it was bad, I didn’t want to see. Instead, I heaved myself forward on my elbows, rolled hard, and threw myself onto my back while looking for a target.
A mundane would have mistaken them for dogs. Of course, mundanes were willfully blind and didn’t acknowledge the supernatural even when it tweaked their nose. A mundane would think the extra tails and the compound eyes were a trick of the eyes. I wasn’t sure how they’d explain away the backlit orange teeth that were busy dripping my blood onto the sickly green carpet.
“Hellhounds, shit!” I hissed.
I couldn’t tell what breed, but the sulfur riding out on every panting breath was proof enough. Hellhounds were as selectively bred as the dogs on earth, and I would have bet my last coin that these were meant for hunting. For a wild moment, I was certain that Murrain had learned about my wavering loyalty and was trying to off me without leaving a body behind. But no, I hadn’t told anyone except my familiar, and Checkers would never betray me. Murrain couldn’t read minds the last time we’d met, but there was a chance he’d absorbed a telepath sometime in the interim. No, more likely this was good old-fashioned revenge.
My first hex caught the ugly thing in the face. The impact jarred its head to one side, but it didn’t go down. It barely even noticed, shaking the spell off like I’d tossed a tennis ball at it instead. I summoned up a curse and flung it with all my might, aiming for the thing’s throat and a spinal column it might not even have.
I’d barely released the spell when a new set of teeth buried itself in my shoulder, and the cabin began to dissolve in a white-hot burst of agony. Susan screamed distantly. The air stretched taut as she drew in her power. The detonation of the hex she’d just flung rolled like thunder through the room. The hellhounds let out utterly impossible howls. Something warm and thick trickled from one of my ears. I couldn’t tell if my eardrum had burst, or the sound had chaffed the inside raw. I barely registered the crash when one of Susan’s huge, gilt-framed mirrors hit the ground near me. By some miracle, the mirror didn’t crack.
The teeth in my shoulder dug deep, stabbing, crunching against bones. There was less blood than I expected, but only because the heat of the hound’s mouth seared the punctures closed before they could gush. It was the only thing keeping me alive, but I couldn’t find any gratitude inside me.
The hellhound gouged a piece of meat the size of a silver dollar from my back, and I screamed. The world went white again. I tried to say the words to a spell, but there was only teeth and fire. And pain. So much pain. My shoulder was in enough pieces to be a jigsaw puzzle.
There was a crash, a gasp, and the thud of bodies hitting the wall hard. When I could see, I found Susan on the floor on the opposite side of the room. She was leaning heavily against the china hutch, one hand pressed to her stomach. Blood seeped from between her fingers, and the less I speculated about the pulsating bulges under her blouse, the better. She lilted to one side and caught herself, barely. Consciousness was making a mad dash for the hills for both of us, but she wasn’t going to let it flee without a fight.
Susan looked at me, her body shaking with the effort it took not to scream. There was a flinty determination etched into her face. That look in her eyes only meant one thing. She was trying to cast, just like me, but she seemed to be having better luck, because the gleaming surface of the mirror at my elbow began to emit light. The light shimmered, sparkled almost, like water on concrete. I’d seen a trick like this a few times before. She was the only witch in our graduating class who’d ever gotten the knack for mirror walking.
My stomach dropped when I realized what she was trying to do. She was trying to open a portal, and I was the only one close enough to reach it. Her legs were bent at unnatural angles. She might have taken care of the hellhounds near her, but they weren’t dead. They’d get up, eventually.
“Susan, no!” I tried to wrench free of the hound turning my shoulder into hamburger, and only succeeded in drawing those searing teeth across my scapula. The sound I made wasn’t human. “Don’t!”
I can’t let her do this, I thought. I have to stop her.
One of the hounds started dragging me forward, whipping its head back and forth. I felt something in my knee pop out of place, and something else broke entirely. I spun and drove both thumbs into the compound eyes of the dog on my shoulder. It let go with a snarl.
The rippling mirror was only inches away now. I couldn’t see a location on the other side. I figured Susan was planning to leave that component of the spell to me. She didn’t look like she’d stay conscious long enough to decide for herself. The hounds she’d thrashed were climbing shakily to their feet again, doubly angry now, smoke curling out from between their teeth. The ring of scarlet around her body had grown alarmingly large.
“Go!”
I considered, in a moment of agonized lucidity, what my options were and found them wanting.
I touched the portal. I had seconds. No, less than seconds, before the spell unraveled and became useless. The portal needed a location. I thought desperately, the pain sucking at my thoughts, and the spell latched onto the first place, the first people I thought of.
A picture formed in the mirror. Granite countertops, a fridge full of magnets, an eggshell white ceiling. Estelle and Lavinia’s apartment in Phoenix. I didn’t dare try for the coven house. I wouldn’t answer to my cousins about what I’ve been up to. Besides, even if I died, they’d somehow manage to bill my corpse for staining their floors with gore. I just hoped my sudden appearance didn’t traumatize the girls. Assuming they were even home. They’d been out on contracts a lot these days.
The sitting room went fuzzy around the edges. Not good. There was blood on my face, on my hands. My shoulder ground like gravel with every shaky inhale. The portal was only a few inches away, but I still wasn’t sure I’d make it. I managed to drag myself forward and the very tip of my nose made contact with it.
There was a blast of light, as cold and bright as a winter sky. I tipped headlong into the mirror and felt the jolt when the hellhound was forcefully dragged off me. Susan must have spelled her mirror to only accept one magical signature—mine. It was a hell of a lot more than I could have managed.
I caught one last glimpse of the sitting room before I slipped away. Susan had made it to the hall before she collapsed. She was slumped over a pile of dead hounds. Bloodied. Not moving.
Then she was gone.
The tableau skipped like an image on a badly tuned television set and then I was falling from Estelle’s full-length mirror onto the floor of their kitchen.
Here was hoping they’d find me before I bled to death.