“I’m not about to give you a day of my life just so that you can answer a question. I don’t even know if you know who I’m looking for.”
“Sure I do,” he said.
“Oh? How?”
“Because why else would a pretty little red-head like you have come all the way down here from the above? Sure ain’t for the drink.”
“So you know something, then. And if you do, you’ll know it’s dangerous.”
“Not to me it ain’t.”
“Maybe not to you, but what about the rest of the good people of this town?”
“Do I look like a sheriff to you?”
“No. You look like someone who’s more interested in getting paid than doing a good deed.”
“Listen missy. I don’t run no God-dang quid pro quo service. You want something? You pay for it.” The barman straightened up. “I suggest you leave, red. Otherwise some of these folks might mistake you for one of my girls, an’ I ain’t gonna stop them.”
My chest tightened at the barman’s suggestion. My hands clenched into fists and I started to grind my teeth. Who the hell was this guy to threaten me? I wasn’t about to have a power trip, but he must have seen what I did to Huntley back there. I wasn’t just alive, I was a witch. But I had to pick my battles, and this wasn’t one of them.
I grabbed the wet note from the table and kicked off the stool I had partially sat down on, but before I could leave someone grabbed my arm.
My entire body began to vibrate. I felt my Power flash within, and for a moment I felt like I could turn this entire building inside out at the wave of my hand and the click of my finger. I would not let myself be intimidated by these people. The person who had grabbed me, though, wasn’t a dirty old drunk. Her bony fingers gave her away before I even turned around. And when I did, the adrenaline surge disappeared and my body relaxed.
“It comes,” she said.
“What?”
Her face was sunken and her lips were cracked, but her eyes were like shiny opals against her tanned skin. The woman’s hair was long, black and curly, and she was covered in bracelets and necklaces of varying size, color and possibly origin. She looked very much like a classical gypsy woman, a Romani, and her eyes gave away a kind of intelligence I simply couldn’t compete with.
Was she the person Collette had sensed from outside? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t have that ability. But I only needed to look at this woman to know I was in the presence of some kind of sage. And a sage with a strong grip, at that.
“The entity you are looking for knows you are here,” she said.
“It… knows?”
“We must leave this place. It is not safe here, for you.”
She tugged on my arm and I followed, and together we made a quick exit through the swinging doors to the Saloon. The patrons largely ignored us, but I could feel the icy chill of death at my back as I left. And with my back turned to it, the Saloon didn’t seem quite as friendly or as jolly as it was on my way in. The piano’s notes were discordant and disorganized. Voices muted to whispers and glasses clinking without hands to guide them.
I hadn’t noticed until we reached the street that I had been holding a breath in my lungs as we left.
I allowed myself a moment to breathe and turned to the Saloon. Its doors swung closed, and tendrils of smoke writhed between them, above them, and beneath them. We’ll be right here, it would say, waiting for you to come back.
“Come,” said the woman, “We must speak quickly. Time is short.”
I turned to her. “But my friends are around here, I have to get them.”
“No,” she said, stern and unmoving. “There is something I must give you if you wish to defeat the evil.”
How could I argue with that?
We made our way briskly down a stony lane, at the sides of which stood buildings of mishmash design. And the more of them I saw, the more I started to realize that the buildings—much like the inhabitants of this little town in the middle of the Underworld—shared something in common. None of them had windows, many were covered in thick cobwebs, and most showed signs of some kind of damage.
One colonial had charred swaths streaking out of the tops of windows. A wooden house had had its ceiling caved in, though by what I couldn’t tell. And the more modern looking townhouse was cracked right down the middle and looked about ready to collapse into itself.
“Why are these houses damaged?” I asked.
“There are more ghosts here than just people,” said the gypsy.
“What do you mean?”
“When something dies or is destroyed, it comes here. A person, an animal, a house, a car. It all comes here.”
We made a turn between buildings and hurried round the back where a chain-link fence was all that stood between Missington’s inhabitants and a… Winnebego. The RV was huge, but it had seen better days. The front of the vehicle had been completely smashed in, as if it had run at full speed into a huge rock or a solid wall. I suspected it was once a light brown color, but time and damage had rendered it a coffee brown and the area around the windshield a charcoal black.
The gypsy woman went up to the side of the van and opened the small door.
“Hurry,” she said, “We do not have much time.”
Chapter Sixteen
The gypsy led me into a van which smelt vaguely of a type of incense I couldn’t quite put my finger on and was covered in ornaments of indeterminate origin. She hurried into the back room, beyond a beaded curtain, and asked me to follow. Through the curtain I came to a small room with no bed, only a set of chairs and a table covered in a purple cloth.
“Sit,” she said, and I did.
The gypsy pulled the cloth off the table to reveal a crystal ball beneath it. The stand was a beautiful ornament; a green and blue design I had never seen before. Snakes, wolves, birds, and even spiders decorated the circular platform that supported the crystal ball atop it. On the table I also noticed a purple pouch and a deck of Nordic tarot cards.
“My name is Madame Aishe,” said the gypsy. “And you come here in search of a torn soul.”
I nodded.
The gypsy waved her hands over the crystal ball in the same way fortune tellers do in movies and two-bit parlors. I had been to one before, a long time ago, and decided it wasn’t for me. I didn’t like being told that my grandmother missed me and then getting charged twenty five dollars for the consultation like the gypsy was some kind of doctor I was visiting. I knew my grandmother missed me. What I wanted was for the gypsy to tell me her name—that would have impressed me. But I detected a slight vibration in the air when Madame Aishe ran her hands over the crystal ball; like a kind of pulse radiating outward from it.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
The gypsy closed her eyes. “The red witch,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“Your soul speaks to me, child. It speaks to everyone with the ability to listen. It wants to be heard.”
“My soul wants to be heard?”
“Heard. Acknowledged. Liberated.”
Liberated. I didn’t like the sound of liberated. “Tell me what you know of why I have come here.”
The gypsy sighed and placed her hands on the table. She opened her eyes. “You seek a powerful being,” she said, “A being which will not go willingly back into its cage.”
Color me impressed. “Do you know where I can find it?”
“I do. It comes sometimes to the city and reaps.”
“Reaps?”
“Souls; they fuel its dark power.”
The Shadow is using ghosts to fuel its magick? Is this what Frank meant when he said that Necromancers were shifty and that their power was stolen? I was starting to learn a lot about the Underworld simply by being down here, and one of the most important things I had learned was that the Underworld took — as Collette had put it. If that was true, then it meant that Collette’s magick also took. But what did it take? I dreaded to think of the a
nswer.
“Tell me where I can find it and how I can stop it,” I said.,
“Your power is impressive, sorceress,” the gypsy said, “But not as impressive as it could be. As it will be.”
“Why did you just call me a sorceress?”
This wasn’t the first time someone had used that word to describe me. As far as I knew, witches and sorcerers were the same thing; just labelled differently. But the way the word had been spoken implied something else, implied meaning.
“Your power is not dependent on external knowledge,” said the gypsy, “Your power comes from the fire of your own soul. Yours is the magick of the universe. All you have to do is go deeper into yourself to find it.”
“Go deeper? I don’t understand. I’m a witch.”
The gypsy shook her head. “A witch’s power comes from without, a sorcerer’s power from within. You are rare. You are the one who can defeat the Shadow, but you must be careful.”
I nodded. “Tell me what I have to do.”
The gypsy pulled her deck of cards closer to her side and then began to draw them. It was a simple Celtic cross: a cross of four cards, with one above, one beneath, and four to the left of it. The cards came fast, one by one lining up to reveal my fate. I knew them all, but Tarot wasn’t something I had dedicated time to learning before. I didn’t know what the cards in the order they had come in meant; but three cards caught my eye, and caused my insides to go even colder. Something I didn’t think possible.
“Why?” I asked, “Why this?”
“Because for all your power, you are blind. Fate,” she said, “Is not on your side. You are the chosen one, but you have misused your power. Fate will not help you.”
Kyle came rushing back to mind like a headache. I was young! I wanted to say, I didn’t know what I was doing! But I knew my breath would fall on deaf ears. I knew all too well that Fate was a living, breathing thing. It did not forgive. It did not forget.
“How can that be? How can I have been chosen as the one to defeat this thing and Fate won’t help?”
“Listen to me,” she said, “I am showing you these cards because you must learn your fate before you leave this place. Memorize their order, recall their meaning, and understand that the answers you are looking for lie within them.”
I arched my neck to get a better view. Cups, Wands, Fate, the High Priestess; these cards were benign, but the others were not. The Devil. Death. The Ten of Swords. The Queen of Swords. These cards gave me pause. The Ten of Swords in particular. Most people believe that the Death card is a bad omen, that it’s the worst card in the deck, but it isn’t. The worst card is the Ten of Swords, because that card represents an obliteration of everything I hold dear. It represents pain, misery, strife, actual death and utter devastation.
No one ever wants the Ten of Swords to show up during a reading.
The gypsy reached into a trunk tucked away beneath the table, in the space between table and wall, and produced two items. First, an uninspiring metal urn. Second, a silver necklace with a stone at its center. I recognized the curved, shiny gem as Black Onyx. It made sense that the stone be Black Onyx, since it was a stone frequently associated with protection from negativity and negative energies. I gathered that they were for me.
My sword and my shield, so to speak.
“Take these,” said the gypsy, “And head east. At the end of the tunnel you will encounter the River of Bone. You must cross it if you wish to find the shadow’s hiding place.”
“Why are you giving these to me?”
“I was buried with them,” she said, “Fate has an interesting way of preparing us for the future, only it doesn’t care if you would be alive or dead when it called on you to act. When I read of your coming in the cards, I knew you would need these items.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” I said.
The gypsy nodded. “I have seen too many souls taken by this evil and wonder when my time shall come. I hope, now that you are here, my time never will.”
I paused. In the space between seconds I wondered whether it would be best to take what she had said and leave to find Collette and the others, or ask her a question she had just prompted. Of course, curious as I was, I couldn’t resist. “What would happen to you, if it… took you?”
The gypsy sighed. “I suppose it will eat me.”
“Eat you? Like, kill you? But aren’t you already dead?”
“Death is only a transition, child,” she said. “This body is my body, and like in life, it can be destroyed.”
“So, you can die… again?”
“For those of us who continue our existence in the Underworld, yes.”
“Why are you here?” I asked. The words fell out of my mouth like a block of ice. Harsh and cold. But I had to know. “Why didn’t you move on?”
“I was ripped from this world. After my parents died, my brother and I were all that were left of our bloodline. I swore to keep him safe, to protect him. And then I died. I lingered for a time, watching him, protecting him as I had sworn to do… until the sickness took him, too.”
A strange chill raced through me and caused me to look over my shoulder, but I turned my attention back at the gypsy. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
She shook her head. “It was his time and, I thought, mine also. But as I watched him loosen his grip on his body I was pulled down here by the same force that draws us all into this place.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Underworld has a will of its own. An intelligence. And while it is a bleak and desolate place, I have more free will now than I ever had in the world of the living.”
“So this is a kind of life for you.”
“This is life, only a life of a different kind.”
“I think I get it,” I said.
“Of course you do. You are the red witch. The one who will change everything.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t want to ask any more questions either. I stood up with my urn and my necklace and made for the front door, but the caravan shook violently and I was sent hurtling against the wall. An awful clicking sound followed, and then the van rocked again. It was like boulders were falling on the ceiling!
“Holy shit!” I said, “What was that?”
The gypsy emerged from behind the beaded curtain, all wide eyes and fear. “We must leave, now!” she said, the urgency in her words as plain as day.
The caravan rocked again and this time I hit the ground. The urn slipped out of my hands and I scrambled to grab it before rising to my feet again. It felt like the ground was opening up beneath us or that a car was repeatedly slamming into the caravan!
“What is that out there!” I said.
“The spiders have come.”
Chapter Seventeen
Spiders? I didn’t have a chance to ponder the question. Before I could think, a black talon impaled the side of the RV through one of the windows and narrowly missed my head. I screamed and pushed myself off the wall, ducked beneath the talon, shoved the door open and made a break for my life. But I couldn’t stop myself from looking back, and when I turned around, I saw it.
The beast was huge and black and covered in spindles. Easily the size of a car, the spider had eight red eyes which atop a wicked pincer mouth dripping with… something. Venom? But its bulb had no particularly distinguishing features. In fact, the entire spider was part beast, part shadow. I could see dark tendrils lashing out from its body, just like the bird Collette had summoned the other day. Only this time I didn’t have to see into the Nether to know the spider wasn’t normal.
I froze. My heart was slamming against my chest, my body buzzing with power—power I had barely felt until now, like a muscle I had forgotten how to flex. An instant passed, and the thing leapt. I ran toward the RV and slid beneath the spider as it landed, but when I spun around the thing was facing me and I found myself backed against the caravan’s metallic outer wall.
It inched closer, mandibles drip
ping with venom, and my heart started to thunder in my head. This thing was going to kill me and then it was going to kill Madame Aishe. I had to act, and I had to do it now. The spider lunged, and with a wave of my hand I sent a blast of power into its face strong enough to fling it into a nearby wall which cracked against the giant insect’s weight. Madame Aishe emerged from the caravan and stared, stunned, at the dazed creature staggering around to regain its footing.
“Run!” I said.
I grabbed her hand and bolted from the side of the caravan, dashing along the spider’s blind side at top speed. But as I ran I became immediately aware that I was alone, and suddenly the ground beneath my feet felt slick and unstable. My Coven. Collette, Damien, Frank. Where were they? Were they okay? Did they know what was happening to me? A scream pierced the dark of the Underworld. Distant, but shrill and loud. If my coven didn’t already know that something was going on, they knew now.
But as I ran with Madame Aishe in tow, I heard something else. Clicking. Echoed, distant. The spider? Was it behind me? I stopped in the middle of an alley between buildings and glanced at the dark space behind us, but the spider wasn’t there.
“What was that thing?” I asked.
“Henchmen,” she said, “Of the one you are looking for.”
“Henchmen? You mean there are more of them?”
“They come from above,” she said.
The clicking was coming from above; from the impenetrable darkness which should have been a sky sitting atop a small town, spiders were falling like rain drops. Huge, black, wicked raindrops.
We were running again, through the alley, down the street, beyond the Saloon. The screams surrounded us, now. Screams and clicks and hisses and… something else. The sounds of talons rending flesh, maybe. I shuddered at the thought and shut my eyes as I ran, and that’s when I bumped into Frank.
“Christ, witch, where have you been?” he asked.
“No time! Where are the others?”
“Over there,” he said, “They went into that old post office to ask questions.”