The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 96
“Rosamara,” my grandmother said as she came up to clasp my left hand, “it’s time you went back to hell.”
The spider-thing snarled and reared back, its fangs dripping with venom.
“Dale,” I yelled, “Leelee, Gustavo. We’re here to help you, but you need to help us.” Behind Rosamara I could see the shadows regrouping, facing us now. They were terrifying.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I felt very strongly that if I could somehow connect with the captive souls on a psychic level, I could help them break free of the hold Rosamara had over them.
I sent my consciousness toward Gustavo and Leelee and Dale, and some of what I was thinking must have leaked into the priest, because he realized what I was doing.
“Gustavo,” he called out, “do you remember your first communion? The party we had afterwards? Esperanza made tres leches cake, and your mother let you have two pieces?”
For a moment the little boy looked confused, and then he smiled. “I like cake,” he said.
“Yes,” Father Paz said, “so do I. Come to me now,” he said.
“Is there cake?” the boy asked.
“There’ll be good things,” Father Paz said, “all kinds of good things.”
The boy smiled wider and took a step toward the priest.
The spider-thing howled and slashed down with one spear-sharp leg, but Leelee reached out and snatched Gustavo out of harm’s way.
“Brave girl,” my grandmother said to her. “You’re such a brave girl, Leelee. Come here to us.”
And Leelee took Gustavo by the hand and took a step away from Rosamara. The expression on the boy’s face was haunted, just as his adult face had been when I’d seen him summoned from the grave twenty years before. It’s not fair, his wounded eyes seemed to say, couldn’t you just leave me in peace?
The spider-thing thrashed in fury and whipped its leg toward Dale, and that’s when I hit it with the full force of everything I had in me, my love and my magic fused. I felt my grandmother’s magic and Father Paz’s faith flowing into me as well, and it made a triangle of power that was shaped like an arrow aimed right at Rosamara’s dark heart.
The arrow pierced the spider and kept going into the dark, where the souls that had gathered behind her were obliterated in a shower of light and heat.
It was like the world’s most spectacular fireworks display condensed into one eternal second. And when it was over, I was standing on one side of the road, and my grandmother and everyone else was standing on the other.
“No,”’ I said, because I knew this was the last time I would ever see any of them, at least in this life, no matter how many other ghosts I might see.
My grandmother blew me a kiss with a smile, then picked up Gustavo and balanced him on her hip, reaching for Leelee with her other hand.
Father Paz looked at me with affection. “Vaya con Dios,” he said, and then he took Leelee’s other hand, and they turned and walked up the road.
Away from me.
The teenage soul that was Dale looked at me for a long moment, his blue eyes clear and untroubled. “Goodbye, Aixa,” he said cheerfully, and then he too turned and walked away.
17
Aftermath
I cried myself to sleep in the cemetery and woke the next morning with a stiff neck and grass stains all over my clothes. I was halfway home when I ran into Esperanza. Her eyes were red and raw from crying. “Did you hear, Aixa? Father Paz passed away last night.”
I put my arms around the older woman. “I am so sorry,” I said, and let her cry. Later I would brew her a tea that would ease her grief.
I walked her to her home, and we arrived to find Enrique Riquelme waiting for us. “I came to pay my respects,” he said softly to Esperanza. “The padre was a good man.” Esperanza accepted the condolences with dignity. Her love for the old priest had been an open secret for years, and it had hurt her to deny it.
“He was a man who inspired goodness,” Enrique continued, and this time his words were directed toward me. I met his eyes, and an unspoken message passed between us.
Do not hurt this woman, amigo, was my message to him.
I would not for the world, was his reply.
I finally got home in the early afternoon. It felt strange to be coming back to the house I’d inherited from my grandmother and to know that she was no longer inhabiting it. I felt untethered, like I had to concentrate or I would float free of gravity.
My grandfather was waiting on the porch as I approached. He stood up to greet me. He did not offer an explanation for where he had been the night before and I didn’t press him for answers.
“Marisol?” he asked.
“She’s gone,” I said.
He nodded as if he’d known that already. “Rosamara Quintana is dead,” he said. “Her house burned down last night, and they found her body in the ashes.”
“Good,” I said.
“I’ve said words over the ashes,” he said. “She won’t be coming back.”
Now it was my turn to nod. “The narcos?” I asked.
“They’ve scattered like the roaches they are. The lawyer Laurencio—”
“Lorenzo,” I corrected.
“—got Elvis released on bail. Tonio is dropping the charges against him on the condition he leaves town.”
“Also good,” I said, wondering if that decision was going to be a problem for him. I didn’t think it would. In the aftermath of Rosamara’s death, the whole town seemed to be taking a collective breath. No one seemed inclined to revisit the events at Enselmo’s house. I wondered, too, if this hard-won peace was going to be a permanent thing, or simply a respite.
Jonah eyed me up and down as if evaluating me for the first time. “You’re a headstrong girl,” he said.
“I’m over eighteen,” I said. “If you’re going to stick around, you’re going to have to stop being such a sexist.”
He thought about that for a moment. “Do you have anything to eat in the house?”
The series continues with Santa Muerte, due out in late October.
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Elemental Arcane
The Eldritch Files, Book One
Phaedra Weldon
ONE
"He's late."
I ignored Kyle's irritating need to state the obvious and pointed to the black band on his left arm. "What's with that? Some royal thing?" Kyle was a bit of an anglophile.
"I'm in mourning for Jeremy."
"Jeremy?"
"The guy I met at Lord Siril's party on Saturday. Don't you remember? The one with the puppy dog eyes?"
"What, did he die? Hence the armband?"
"Just in my heart. I saw him with a hottie last night at Le Roundup."
I sighed. No wonder he was pointing out my boyfriend's shortcomings. Kyle was suffering from a broken heart.
The fourth one of the week.
We were in my magic shop, Bell, Book and Candle. It sat sandwiched between an ice cream parlor and a tourist bookstore, and it was a block or so down from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. We were close enough for tourists to meander in and buy the gitchie-goomie harmless crap that wouldn't even screw up their karma, visible to our legitimate clientele of the magical persuasion, and far enough away from the crazy drunks of Bourbon Street, which was my preference.
Wednesdays were slow. It's that middle-of-the-week slump where customers are tired and Friday feels too far away. A few tourists meandered in and out, but they mostly came through for the atmosphere. Kyle Kendrick, my closest friend and my partner in this life of shop-keeping, maintained what he called ambiance, with burbling desk fountains, quiet dulcimer music that gave me a righteous headache, and the oh-so-not-subtle fog machine he pulled out every Halloween to give the place that Other World feel.
Both hands on the clock over the front door pointed straight up. Noon. I was waiting on Robin, my boyfriend of six months, to pick me up for our usual Wednesday lunch. There was a killer taco place just a mile up the street on St. Philip that made the best burritos, so I always treated.
He'd called earlier and said a few roads were blocked off, so getting through traffic to my shop would be iffy. I knelt down beside Grey, my wolf familiar, and stroked her soft white and gray fur. I didn't really know if she was a familiar, but from the moment she showed up in Macon, Georgia during one of my trips and helped me escape a grave-guarding party of whacked-out cultists bent on sacrificing me on the altar of their declared freedom, I considered her my bestest friend in the whole world.
Sort of telling, isn't it? That my best friend is covered in fur and walks on all fours?
And is a girl.
It tells me I need to get out more.
I considered heading back into my office to catch any news on the roadblocks.
That's when something thudded hard against the front window.
Grey and I looked up from where we knelt near the front to see a woman splayed against the glass. My shop had four tall windows, two on either side of the door. She was at the window on the left, closest to the entrance. Blood covered her wide-eyed face. It smeared over the glass in long streaks as she pawed at the window, and I could see it splattered over her clothes.
This wasn't how our mornings usually started at the shop, but it wasn't completely surprising either, since normal had never been a stable part of my life. That's because I'm Samantha E. Hawthorne, local Witch and entrepreneur.
"Great Lord and Lady!" Kyle dropped the tarot deck he'd been arranging on a nearby table that held up a burbling desk fountain, and ran to the door. Grey and I stood as Kyle pulled the bloody lady inside.
Something smelled wrong. And I don't mean like a bad smell. I mean wrong. The smell wasn't part of this world, but somewhere else. Maybe something else. Grey gave a low gruff growl. She smelled it too. The only way to describe it to anyone who wasn't Gifted with magic would be raw chicken, left in a warm, sealed room. For a week.
The woman went down on her knees, grabbing at Kyle's shirt. Her gaze locked with his. "Call nine-one-one! It's my daughter! My daughter!"
Oh Lady Darksome…is the blood her daughter's? This was bad, bad news and I was glad the meandering tourists had long since left. I knelt next to Kyle and put my hand on the woman's arm, somewhere that wasn't covered in blood. I needed to use my dex spell for a species check. It worked a lot like a pokédex in that it allowed me to analyze people and discover what they were. Human, Lycan, Vampire, or Other.
And Other wasn't always the better choice. In fact, it never was. I needed to know if her daughter had been attacked, she wasn't the attacker.
Usually Other creatures, meaning things that weren't part of this world, could sense me and what I was. They knew I had the power to banish their asses back to where they belonged, and I could do it painfully. I used a smaller version of the spell, like dex lite. It didn't require any words or singsong incantations. Just me with a desire to find out if she was human.
Anyone with magical or Other sight could see my magic the way I did. Concentric pentagrams appeared one after the other, each with their corresponding Element. An Earth banishing, a Water banishing, a Fire banishing, and an Air banishing. The last would be the Spirit summon, and I would have my answer.
She was human.
But that smell…
"Hey, did you guys hear about what happened over at the—what's going on?" Ivan Westerfield, a friend, employee and a member of my little group, or coven if you like the word, though we were way less than the recommended standard of thirteen, came around my right side, probably from the break room. He instinctively locked the front door and faced us as Kyle and I knelt with the bloodied woman.
Ivan wasn't like anyone, or anything, I had ever known. He defied all stereotypes, from his Japanese American features to his grunge face piercings and body tattoos to his German English name and southern accent.
But it didn't stop there. Ivan was a Witch like no one had ever seen.
And I mean no one.
"Balls…is that blood?" Ivan moved around and crouched next to me. The light from the windows glinted off the silver ring in his lower lip. He moved the woman's hair from her neck and tucked it behind her ear, exposing what looked like bite marks, as well as a missing chunk of skin. The coppery scent of blood mingled with that foul odor. "What is that smell?"
I knew Ivan would sense the wrong about this whole thing. "Ivan, call an ambulance."
"My way or—"
"The fastest way." Ivan's way was the most unconventional method of making a call. I addressed the bleeding woman. "Ma'am, did the same person who attacked you also attack your daughter?"
The woman moved her left hand from Kyle's arm and put her Kung-Fu Death Grip on my arm. "No! My daughter attacked me! My daughter did this and then she jumped on that nice grocery man!"
Whaaaaat?
TWO
Her daughter?
The three of us glanced at each other, unsure what to say. I just wanted to make sure I heard her right.
Her daughter attacked her? And a grocer?
I've never been a comforting person. It's just not in my nature. Luckily, Kyle was and he reached over to wrench the woman's hand from my arm. Ouch. That was going to leave a bruise.
Kyle soothed the woman while my brain ran at a breakneck speed. Was this lady for real? How old was her daughter? Was she small or large? What the hell possesses a daughter to bite her mother? Was it a disease? Or maybe the girl was possessed by a demon?
I stood up with an eye on the front windows. The million-dollar question?
Where was her daughter now?
"You don't look so good," Ivan said as he stood with me.
My gaze roamed over the blood on the glass, the floor and now on my shirt. "I'm trying to figure out what would have caused a girl to viciously attack her mother like that. And figure out where her daughter is at this moment." I focused on Ivan. His light brown eyes calmed my nerves, much like Robin's usually did. "We need to find out if someone called the police. Can you do that? Did you call an ambulance yet?"
"Doing it now." Ivan closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, and held his hands out, palms up. I could see him login to the web as the air between him and me shimmered and a smattering of ghostly screen images appeared. His eyes opened, no longer brown, but green. His hands moved over invisible connections only he could see, broke into security cameras and tapped their way into the computer systems of the local New Orleans police department.
This is what made him so unique.
Ivan was a Cyber Witch. He manipulated the magic of the electronic world. The thing that usually threw a wrench into the use of magic with its magnetic fields was his playground.
See? What'd I tell you? Like nothing anyone's ever seen.
"Please…you've got to stop her before she kills someone else."
I looked back at the woman as Kyle put his hand to the side of her face. A soft, yellow glow ringed the outline of his hands and I sensed his calming magic cover the woman in layers of peace. But I also knew silencing the woman's hysteria was like putting a Band-Aid over a meteor crater.
It just wasn't gonna work.
And then… "Wait—" I held up a hand. "Kills someone else? Your daughter killed someone?"
The woman looked up at me. "Mr. Higgins."
Well, crap on a dragon's— "So, you were in Mr. Higgins's grocery store when she attacked you?"
The lady nodded as Kyle concentrated on keeping her hysterics under a short leash.
"And…you ran here?"
"Yes."
"Why here? That grocery is two blocks down."
"I'm so sorry, but something pulled me to your door. I knew you could help me."
Kyle opened his eyes and looked up at me. "Yeah…that Guardian Sentinel thing of yours at work again."
Crap.
Grey growled as she leapt past me to the door. She stood in front of it, her four legs splayed out as if she were positioning herself for a fight. Her lips drew back, exposing some seriously sharp fangs.
"Baby…what's wrong…"
A little girl, no more than six, maybe seven, ran up to the window at that moment and slapped her hands flat against the same glass. More blood spattered from the impact over the slick surface. I felt, as much as sensed, the abominable evil that radiated from her and took several steadying steps back.
And the smell…this thing is what smells so bad!
"Holy Goddess…what the hell is that thing?" Kyle asked, noticing the little girl at the window (and who wouldn't?). That slip broke his concentration with the mother. She turned and threw up her hands as she cried out in terror when she spotted her daughter.
Dressed in pink corduroy pants, a Hello Kitty shirt and pink jacket, the girl clawed at the glass, and then slammed it with her fists. Her eyes glowed red, and when she opened up her mouth she exposed rows and rows of sharp little teeth.
Uh uh. I'm sorry. But that just ain't right. It sure as hell looks familiar…where have I seen this before?
I had no idea what it was or where it came from, but I sure as shit planned on putting it back. This wasn't this woman's daughter anymore. "Kyle, strengthen the wards."
"Already on it." He stood, pulling the hysterical woman with him to the back of the shop. He would probably lock her in my office so he could get to his thurible, mortar and pestle. Kyle was a Hedge Witch, a Little Bender who could do exactly as the legends said—bend and shape reality by using natural combinations of herbs, spells, incantations, and symbols. My Elemental Magic allowed me speed and strength, but Kyle's would last longer with little effort exerted from his own personal energy. His magic came from organic things around him.
I held up my right hand to feed energy into the wards until I felt Kyle's power kick in. I appreciated the faint aroma of Dragon's Blood Rede as it softened the stench of the thing in the window. The ward should stop the little monster from getting into the shop, even if it broke the glass.
