Chapter Seven #3
A sound penetrated his ear-patch—fractured musical notes, broken, off-key. Beneath it, screaming, as if someone was being tortured. A cracking like sticks breaking. With his left hand, he unfastened the palillos castanets, ready for use.
EJ blew a softer note, a search working targeted specifically to Walter.
If anyone was here, hiding, waiting, they would be able to locate EJ by the sound.
Magic always had a cost. But he knew by the echo only he could hear that Walter was close.
Very close. He walked steadily toward the kitchen.
A woman’s body lay in a pool of blood. The cop, Rocas, was bending over her, administering CPR.
At his feet was another pool of blood. He lifted a foot to step over it.
A shadow moved at the corner of his eye. He shifted his step right.
Too late. A vampire’s arm was around his throat, cutting off his wind.
He gripped the vamp’s elbow. Stepped-bent-whipped forward. Snapped down. One-handed judo throw.
Fangs scraped across the skin at his throat.
EJ released the elbow. Reversed the flute and stabbed the vamp. Cutting into the bloodsucker’s groin. He bent his wrist and cut up, pulling the sharp blade through undead flesh.
The vampire screeched. Wounded, not a death wail. But he released his hold.
The vamp was gripping a small disk. Like a hockey puck.
The sound of broken bells and screaming poured from the disk. The crack of fracturing bones and claws rending flesh. The music of demon power.
Angie’s warning.
Everything happened in slices of a second.
EJ’s magic roared into him. He clicked the palillos once, activating them.
The vamp dropped the disk. Toward the pool of blood.
EJ tossed the battle castanets at the disk. As they flew, he tried to speak. But his windpipe was damaged. He forced air through his throat. Spoke, a guttural sound. A wyrd of power. “Smachdachadh. A ribe.” Gaelic for “Control. To trap.”
Still in Delta Mode, magic roiled out of him, into the castanets.
He broke the vamp’s neck. But the vamp didn’t fall.
The sound of hell’s orchestra filled the air as the EEB erupted from the disk.
Holy hells. It was a powerful mother. Not a Bes.
Something bigger. EJ shoved all his magic, all he was, out with the wyrd, repeating, “Smachdachadh. A ribe.”
His sight telescoped closed, black around the edges.
He dropped toward the floor.
The vampire, head to the side, attacked him.
Angie
I drew my cloak around me as I dove from the el-car. Too late. I’m too late.
Villetti was crab-walking across the side yard, toward the back of the house. Holding a transparent multipurpose shield in front of him, as if that would stop an assault working.
I darted around him. Into the front door.
“Damn it, Everhart! Douglas, Piedmont. Cover her!”
Footsteps entered behind me. Humans. Idiots.
I raced in, gathered myself to leap over the bodies in the hallway. Following the blazing light of the magic.
Energies buzzed across my cloak as I shoved off with one foot, leaping over the cop and the vampire.
The power of multiple workings sizzled along the null Agric.
Burned along the wood moldings and casings on the walls.
Brilliant and multicolored. My brother’s magic, blue and gold.
A demon’s magic, orange and black. Mixed together. Inseparable.
I landed. Slowed. With one hand, I pulled the cape’s hood up to protect my head. I held the staff in front of me, my left thumb hovering above the activating trigger. I took a step. My foot landed in a tangled skein of power, the magics trapped in a strange type of stasis.
I studied the magics around my foot. It was a tangle of EJ’s magic and a demon’s vicious darkness. The flesh of my left hand sizzled and froze. If I pressed the trigger, the demon would be sucked away. But so could EJ’s magic. EJ’s soul.
I pulled my foot free. Rounded the corner.
Took it all in with a single glimpse.
EJ, one hand in the air as if frozen in mid-working. His body was draped over a vampire, a big thug with a powerlifter’s muscles, a mohawk, and tattoos from the eighties.
The vamp and EJ were motionless but bleeding—my brother a little, the vamp a lot.
The vamp’s head was on backward. Should be a paralyzed lump on the floor. But one arm was in the air, fingers clawed, coated with blood.
The demon had been arrested mid-motion as it exploded from the disk. Its coiled energies controlled by the castanets on the floor.
And then EJ’s finger twitched, just a fraction. A strand of his hair shifted.
EJ’s wyrd working wasn’t a time stop, like Aunt Jane used to do. Like I used to do, bubbling time. This was simply slowed action. Everything in slow motion. Had EJ and Section Seven learned how to do that? Or had EJ on his own?
Or…had his working been an untested, last-ditch effort to give me a chance to “do my thing,” as EJ sometimes said.
“Angie—”
“Stop,” I said. “Don’t move, Villetti. Don’t get any closer.” Without taking my eyes from the tableau, I said, “Walter? You here?”
“To your right.”
His liquid Jamaican words were steady and peaceful. The calm tones helped me get my breath. “Get everyone out of here. Fast. EJ has the demon locked down, but it won’t hold. I need space to work and if the house blows, I don’t want anyone in here with me.”
“I’m not leaving,” Villetti said. “And if your bodyguard touches me, that is assault on a police officer, so don’t even think about picking me up and hauling me out, Walter.”
“I cannot stop you from being an idiot, Detective Villetti,” Walter said, his voice without inflection.
“No one can. With the exception of the wounded Mithran in the front closet, I will clear the house of all others still alive, though that will disrupt your crime scene. And the queen will not be happy that you are not safe, Detective.”
“I don’t care what your queen wants,” Villetti spat. “I’m staying on the job.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Let a girl work.” I followed the intermingled workings, the knots and tangles of light and power and…
that single thread that already connected me to EJ.
That single thread of light was twined with the tiniest thread of pure black.
The black thread extended to the big thug of a vampire beneath EJ and ran to the pair of castanets near EJ’s fingers.
There, the darkness was tightly knotted into EJ’s bright magics.
EJ, the fanghead, the demon, and now my magic were all knotted together.
Black threads weren’t simply black, as in a crayon or tube of artist paint. They meant death magic workings and demon magic woven together. The black was the black of hell and darkness and eternal screaming created by a death witch.
A death witch had bound this demon into the backward-facing vampire.
I knew a death witch who had worked long and hard to keep her energies under control, tightly bound, deep inside, so she wouldn’t kill everyone and everything around her.
Our mother, Molly Everhart, had death magics.
Death magic witches were executed if anyone ever found out.
But this wasn’t Mama’s magic. This was another witch’s power.
In my side vision, I saw Walter lift two forms from the bloody floor. One was a female cop. The other was Londyn. He tossed each of them over a shoulder, and carted them through the open back door, their feet and arms swaying with each step. Vampire strength.
Both women were bloody. I hadn’t seen the cop get injured.
A good two seconds later Walter was back and gripped the backward-facing muscle-bound vamp’s feet to drag him out. The strands stretched.
“Stop!” I said.
Walter stilled.
I shoved my own magic, my power, into my right hand. Coated my flesh with what I called a gauntlet, a personal hedge I had created from a few drops of my blood and raw magic. It allowed me to work death energies with relative safety. If I was very, very careful.
Carefully, gently, I reached out and tweaked the thread of death from the vampire. Between my fingers, it whipped in the air, stinging. Even through the gauntlet, it was like pinching a swarm of killer bees, the pain shocking through me like electricity before my magic could coat it.
Giving it a delicate tug, I pulled, twisting the blackness of death free. Holding it between two fingers, a cavernous desperation and depression opened beneath me. Death. War. Helpless emptiness…
I tied the black thread off and dropped it, leaving it hanging in the air. Breathed out the misery that wanted me to slit my own throat.
The bright thread that attached me to EJ was next.
It was currently a shimmering yellow. I rubbed my fingers to my thumb to restore feeling inside the gauntlet.
Tugged the thread. It was attached to EJ’s castanets, and from them to EJ’s mouth.
His wyrd working. I slipped the thread from the castanets, coiling it away from the death strand, tucking the clean and brilliant yellow one into my brother’s collar.
I whispered to Walter, “Vamp. Fast. Take his head.”
Walter whipped away the gigantic fanged goon.
To the door and outside. The vamp’s head bumped on the steps with hollow thonks.
Five seconds later, Walter entered the front door, a bloody vamp-killer in his hand.
He wiped it on the clothing of the staked vamp at the front, sheathed it.
Lifted a male cop, a young kid, really, and the vamp, and carried them out front.
Vampire speed. In less than fifteen seconds after I separated my brother’s magic from the death magic, the house was cleared so far as I knew, except for EJ, Walter, Villetti, and me.
And the demon that was tied by another yellow thread, one woven with orange demon power, to the castanets.
It was trapped with EJ’s power, hung in the demon stasis working.