Chapter Two #2
Her other shoulder popped free, and she slid out of the monitor with a wet squelch. It was disturbingly reminiscent of a human birth. Blood splashed my face. It covered my boots, soaked into my jeans and spattered my T-shirt. Hers or someone else’s?
If I’d had any doubt before, this confirmed her identity.
Bloody godsdamned Mary.
She responded as if she’d heard my thoughts. Her smile was too wide, too happy, too celebratory. She thought she had me.
“Bring the child.” She sprayed out a mouthful of blood as she spoke.
Good thing I was dressed head-to-toe in black. Even my hair was the darkest shade of brown, so although it, too, was drenched, it didn’t immediately look like blood.
It was at this point that Cecil made a snick sound, alerting me that I was still inside the containment circle. A rookie mistake, damn it. I eased back a few inches, until my heels butted against the soil-salt line.
Mary floated over to me. She didn’t appear to have feet.
The hem of her tattered gown hovered a foot off the ground.
Her insectile arms morphed into smooth-skinned black serpents that wrapped around my throat, loosely at first, with pulsing squeezes that told me how easy it would be for her to kill me.
“Chiiild.” The sound of her voice was what your soul being wrenched out through your ears must feel like. Too much of it, and I’d find myself slip-sliding into madness.
“Bloody Mary. I banish you. To Hell.” I managed between squeezes.
“Do you?” She cackled. “Poor, stupid human. You’re going to learn that I am not so easily evicted.”
Fennel growled. He paced the outside of the circle, fur standing on end. He leapt onto the bed and hissed at Mary, an obvious attempt to draw her attention away from me.
“I fear no one, feline of the depths, not even you. There is nothing you can do to me that is worse than the horrors in which I reside. Bring me the child or I’ll kill this—” Her eyes, twin dots of red in the center of ivory bulbs of sclera stared into mine.
They widened, revealing the upper and lower curvatures of each orb. “Witch?”
She loosed her grip on my throat, and I fell to my knees in the blood.
“You.”
The second I hit the floor, I crawled out of the circle, careful not to break the lines. I collapsed against Violeta’s bed, coughing and rubbing my throat.
“Witch. Lilibet Lennox.”
Hell. It knew my name.
“I go by Betty,” I rasped. Sarcasm was my love language, but it was also my hate language. And my scared language.
“Lennox Witch,” she repeated. “Kin to the grave demon, child of—” A whistling sound erupted from her throat. It took me a moment to realize she was choking.
“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she said.
Her neck cracked, and her head flopped to her left shoulder.
The serpent arms disappeared. The insectile ones made a quick appearance then they went away, too.
Two decidedly human feet sprouted from the hem of her dress.
Her arms reappeared and were also human.
Her eyes shrank, sinking back into her face. Her jaw hung open.
She bent at the waist and flew back through the monitor ass-first. This time when blood spurted out of the screen, I was certain it was hers.
The monitor collapsed, deflating like Gnath’s flesh, until it was a puddle of melted plastic.
Ida burst into the room. “Betty? Are you okay? I got locked out. I heard someone calling for Violeta. Did Mary show up?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she still here? I don’t see any signs.” She peered around the room then behind the door. “When Joyce summoned her, there was blood everywhere. We had to repaint the damned room.”
“Of course there’s blood. Take a look around.” I gestured to the room.
“Where?”
“Everywhe—” I slowly lowered my hand. The blood was gone.
Every single drop.
I checked my clothes. My hair. Nothing.
I glanced at Fennel. “That happened, right?”
He nodded.
Cecil scurried up the side of the desk to inspect the melted monitor. He looked from it to me to Fennel.
“Betty, are you all right?” Ida asked.
“I’m not hurt.” I shook my head to clear it. “She’s gone now. I’m okay.”
In a remarkable demonstration of restraint, Ida refrained from making any nasty remarks to Senora Cervantes as she and Fennel shuffled me out the door. Cecil had taken his place at the back of my neck and was making odd, cooing noises in my ear.
Was he trying to calm me?
Ida drove us home in my Mini. Ordinarily, her driving would’ve had me white-knuckling the dash, but tonight I was too rattled to care.
“You want to tell me what happened in there?”
“How do you know about that group Ghost?” I asked, instead of answering her.
“I’m a woman of the world. Plus, I spend a lot of time on the music side of YouTube.” She swerved to avoid a wad of Russian thistle rolling across the road. “I answered your question, now answer mine.”
She swerved again. I hadn’t seen any tumbleweed on the way in, but the wind had picked up and now the stuff was all over the place.
“After Gnath left, the real Mary showed up.” I shuddered. “She’s terrifying. You were a brave kid to face her down.”
“Not like I had a choice. If I hadn’t, she’d have killed Joyce.” Ida harrumphed, obviously uncomfortable with talking about it. “What happened after she showed up?”
“She tried to choke me, but I got away and banished her,” I said.
“Oh, okay.”
Good. She’d believed me. That was easier than I’d thought it would be.
“So, I’ve got this bridge to sell you,” Ida said, heaping on a heavy dose of sarcasm. “It’s in New York now, but they’re willing to move it to Smokethorn if you give me a hundred bucks.”
Damn. Should’ve known better. The woman knew me too well.
“Fine. I lied,” I grumbled. “Mary recognized me. She knew my name, and she was afraid to mess with me. She got sucked into the monitor and then it melted. Happy?”
“That’s good. Means your reputation as a powerful witch is preceding you.
For once, it’s the kind of reputation you don’t mind someone writing about on a bathroom stall.
Not that I minded the stall stuff, either.
” She was teasing me, trying to lighten the situation, but it felt too heavy for that.
Way too heavy. As in, the situation was crushing me.
“She mentioned Sexton,” I said.
“Makes sense. He probably told everyone to leave you alone.” She dodged yet another tumbleweed. “If you think ol’ Gramps is scary on this plane, you should see him in the underworld. He’s something else entirely.”
“Maybe that was it.”
“I’m sure it was,” she said, but her expression said otherwise. Her mouth was tight and the lines around her eyes were more pronounced.
“Does that sound like something he’d be likely to do?” I asked.
Ida had experience with Sexton. Most of it horrible, but, as a necromancer, she understood him in ways I didn’t.
The lines in her face shallowed, and she nodded. “Actually, yes. He’s protective of the things he cares about.”
“Things.”
“People, I mean. And also things. Because some of the things demons care about can’t rightly be described as people.” She slowed for a four-way intersection. There was no one else around for miles, so she did a California stop and carried on through.
“He does seem to care about me,” I said. “He helped me find Ronan.”
“That’s right.”
It sounded reasonable enough to believe. But then, I was ready to believe anything, because the alternative was too horrifying to contemplate.
If my presence terrified a monster like Bloody Mary, what kind of monster did that make me?