Circle of Blood: A Witch Hunt Novel

  She looked up at one woman and saw that her eye sockets had shrunken and she looked like a walking skeleton.

  Desdemona had used, relied on magic her entire life. Until this moment, though, she’d never realized how integral a part it was of the body and spirit of someone with the power. She was seeing the results of the loss of that power right before her eyes.

  She herself was weak and shaking, nauseated from the pain, and after a moment she realized there was something terribly wrong. Her injuries hadn’t started to heal. With injuries this extensive the healing part was automatic, requiring no thought on her part.

  Maybe she was too drained of energy. She felt the concrete where it touched her cheek, and she reached down past it to the earth below and pulled some of its energy into her. She could feel the surge and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  And moments later realized that what was wrong with her had nothing to do with energy levels. Her body still wasn’t healing. She looked at the people around her, who were decaying as their magic was stripped from them, and realized she’d lost too many of her own gifts, her own magic, to be able to heal anymore.

  Blind panic filled her and she began to thrash about until she realized that she was in jeopardy of letting go of more of her power. Then she forced herself to lie still as she tried to figure out what to do.

  Deep inside she could feel the other one stirring. She was probably happy. She had hated the magic, hated the power. She would have given anything to rid herself of it. But Desdemona couldn’t, wouldn’t live without it.

  The energy flowing from her own fingertips into her body gave her a sudden idea. A man was passing right behind her. She stretched out and tripped him. He fell next to her and she scooted her body next to his, careful not to let her trapped hands lose contact with her abdomen. He was flailing on the ground, but his leg muscles had seized up like his arms and he didn’t have the flexibility required to stand. She got as close as she could and then she contorted her leg and pressed it against the fingertips of his left hand.

  She felt the magic flowing into her, foreign, different from her own, and at first she jerked away, freaked out by the sensation.

  It’s the only way, she told herself. She forced her leg back into contact with his hand and flinched as his magic poured into her. She couldn’t help wondering if this was what a transfusion felt like, only on a far more intense scale. She doubted the blood felt so foreign to the recipient as his magic did to her, though.

  Her body began to spasm and she wondered if it was rejecting the foreign magic. Someone was taking it from everyone, though, and he must have found a way around this problem. She gritted her teeth and tried to calm her mind, center her energies.

  Liquid fire felt as if it were pouring through her veins, and the guy on the ground started moving less and less. He was dying. Better his magic went to her than to whoever was trying to bleed them all dry.

  Let go before he dies.

  It was that inner voice. Desdemona refused to listen.

  The man was just taking his last breath and suddenly her leg jerked away from his body. She hadn’t done that. She wondered if she was losing more control to whoever was sucking people’s magic. It couldn’t be that the other self was exerting that much influence, could it?

  She didn’t have time to figure it out. The man was dead. She took a deep breath, reached out, and tripped a woman.

  “Help me,” the woman groaned, her words barely intelligible, as she fell on top of Desdemona.

  “I can barely help myself,” Desdemona hissed as she tried to remain still and let the woman’s magic, her very essence, pour into her. The fire coursing through Desdemona’s veins intensified and she felt as if her eyes were burning from the inside out.

  Again, when the woman was breathing her last, the inner voice urged, Let go.

  Desdemona broke the contact, not sure if she had been the one to do it. The pain was all she could feel. The zombie people had nearly passed her. She could see them walking, some half dragging their bodies forward to whatever fate awaited them.

  One final set of feet began to shuffle by her, and she tripped what turned out to be a young girl. The girl rolled over on her side, her legs and arms useless. The girl’s eyes pleaded with Desdemona.

  There was nothing she could do to save her. All she could do was ensure that no more of the girl’s power, her essence, went to the one who was trying to kill her.

  Again, Desdemona let go a moment before the girl died.

  Her body had stopped spasming at some point during the last transfer, and now as she lay still she could feel herself starting to heal. She was relieved but then a moment later wondered what would happen when her arms could push up off the ground and move of their own accord again, sending her power to the unknown witch who was trying to take it.

  She’d just have to break her arms again, she realized.

  She turned her head and saw the army of the walking dead. They were beginning to drop like flies, and she could feel death all around her in the air. The last few teetered on their feet and then collapsed.

  And a moment later, whatever was trying to pull energy from her stopped.

  Desdemona blinked in surprise, then slowly, cautiously sat up, hands still pressed to her stomach. Her body was reacting strongly to the magic that she had pulled into herself, but it felt as though it was sorting itself out, merging the new with the old.

  She’d never known it was possible to take a person’s power from him. Energy, yes, power, no.

  She got to her feet, hesitant to move her hands. After a few more seconds she finally moved one hand. It was healed enough to be more functional and there was no power pouring out of her fingertips, no rigidity of the muscles trying to force the arm straight.

  It must be truly over. Whoever it was must have sensed when the last of the magic flowed to him and stopped pulling. He couldn’t sense Desdemona because she had interrupted the flow of her power outward.

  Thanks to the help of the other self that she hated.

  She walked slowly forward, approaching the first few of the other bodies, the ones that had collapsed on their own. They were dead, faces almost unrecognizable as human, lesions covering their arms and necks. She didn’t touch them.

  This was a type of magic that was strange and new to her, and despite everything she had seen and done, it even sickened her. Outright killing these people would have been kinder than what they experienced, but that wouldn’t have accomplished the goals of the one who had done that to them.

  How powerful must a witch be in order to suck the life force from so many at once? She kept walking by the bodies, marveling at the various states of decay. With weakened power she hadn’t even been able to heal herself. The relationship between the life essence and the ability of the person who had power was clearer to her than it had ever been before.

  Looking at the decayed flesh, she also couldn’t help wondering if something like this had been what had inspired stories of zombies in the beginning. The way they had walked, the decaying of their flesh, the moaning sounds they had made all screamed classic horror movie to her. All that was missing was a desire to eat brains. She shuddered just thinking about it.

  “Frickin’ New Orleans,” she muttered.

  She heard something and she froze, wondering if the witch had come to survey his or her handiwork. It could even be an entire coven of witches; that would make more sense than one witch wielding all this power.

  Desdemona looked around, expecting an attack from any quarter. None came.

  The sound came again, barely a whisper.

  She turned and surveyed the dead at her feet, wondering if it had come from one of them. Finally she spotted a teen boy with dark, curly hair. His body seemed to be in less disrepair than the others. As she watched she caught the barest movement of his chest.

  She walked over and carefully knelt down beside him, making sure not to touch him in case this was some sort of trap.

  Hi
s eyes were open and he looked up at her, in pain that was so real, it actually made her hunch her own shoulders in an effort to ward it off.

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  “She took it, the magic,” he whispered.

  He was dying; she could feel it. She also knew there was nothing she could do for him even if she had wanted to.

  “Who took it? How did she do it?” Desdemona asked.

  “I don’t know how, but I saw her the other day, talking with some of the others, pretending to be one of us, but I knew she wasn’t. She was . . . evil.”

  He shuddered as he tried to breathe.

  “Then what happened?”

  “She left, but I was afraid. I wanted to go home, but I couldn’t. I tried to warn the others that she was the one keeping us here. Some of us wanted to go, tried, but couldn’t.”

  “And then?” she urged as he paused.

  “She came for us. She did this.”

  “Who is she? Do you know her name, what she looks like?”

  “She had black hair, like the night, like death.”

  The boy was almost gone and she didn’t have time to lose. She reached inside his mind, looking for an image of the woman he was referencing. Finally she saw a vague outline, a woman with long hair. She pushed harder, trying to make the face come clear.

  A wave of energy slammed into her so hard that it knocked her off her feet and threw her twenty feet away. She hit the cement with a bone-crunching jolt and felt blood vessels bursting all throughout her body. A rib splintered and drove itself into her lung.

  She lay still for a moment, unsure if the death rattle she heard was coming from her or the boy. She closed her eyes and focused on rapidly healing herself. She pulled in energy from the ground, the air, and the last gasp left to the boy.

  She screamed in anguish as everything knit back together. When it was done she staggered to her feet and over to the boy’s body. Whoever the woman with the black hair was, she was powerful, so powerful that she had been able to leave booby traps for anyone trying to access an image of her in the minds of those who had seen her. It was a whole new level of magic, and Desdemona knew that she was going to have to find a way to make up for wasted years when she should have been learning to do so much more.

  She straightened and headed as fast as she could toward the exit to the theme park. She didn’t look back. The entity in the parking lot had been right. There was only death here.

  Almost an hour later she arrived back at the house where she had been staying. She staggered inside and made it to the bedroom, where Freaky was curled up, waiting for her. The black panther yawned and stretched and let her know in his own way that she had been gone far too long.

  She scratched him absently behind the ears, and the panther purred and leaned into her hand, clearly enjoying the attention. His current incarnation was much more fearsome than his original. When she was little she had made the pure energy creature into the form of a tiny black kitten, her only friend. She wished that as a child she’d found a way to keep her mom from taking Freaky away from her when she found out about him.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. The battle at the amusement park had left her shaken, uncertain, and she hated that feeling of powerlessness. It was her entire childhood in a single emotion.

  Great supernatural powers, and still totally helpless. It was a nightmare, the same one that had plagued so many of her tortured nights. She sat down on the bed and pulled her knees up under her chin.

  She had thought with all of her coven dead, there’d be no one anymore who could terrorize her. She’d been wrong and the hatred she felt for the woman with the black hair just intensified as she turned to stare at the picture of the cross and the bloody words taunting her. She was sure it was that woman who had left the picture for her. Only someone with that kind of power could have played her as a pawn for months.

  She was no one’s pawn. Now she knew, though, that she was vulnerable, and she had to do something about that, and fast.

  It was strange; she was a woman grown but her clear memories ended when she was twelve. Growing up, being an adult, all of those things she only caught glimpses of, like shadows in the pieces of a broken mirror.

  She was also beginning to understand that her inability to control her own emotions and her lack of exposure to logic were hindrances. She couldn’t afford them. She was like a child trapped in a woman’s body, and there was only one person who could help her.

  The hated other self.

  She could feel that one stirring inside her even now, trying to break free, trying to influence Desdemona. It wouldn’t work. She was the one in control now, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t use and manipulate the other one to help her find the witch she needed to kill.

  Come to me.

  Desdemona closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and then exhaled. In her mind she was seated on the floor of the basement that had belonged to her high priestess. The place where the massacre had happened. It was a terrible place, even she couldn’t help feeling that, and given her memories of what had happened there, she wished she were somewhere else, anywhere else.

  “But this is where it all happened,” a soft voice said.

  Desdemona looked up and saw Samantha standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  4

  “I hate you,” Desdemona said, an intensity of raw, overwhelming emotion flooding her.

  “I fear you,” Samantha replied simply, quietly. The apparition was wearing a white dress and was somewhat transparent but still recognizable for who she was and what she represented. She stepped forward and then slowly sat down on the floor across from Desdemona, mimicking her posture.

  “Fear is for the weak.”

  “It’s not weakness to feel fear, it’s weakness to let it keep you from acting,” Samantha countered.

  “And what is hatred but ignorance?” Desdemona snarled.

  “It is that, and also lack of mercy and forgiveness and compassion,” Samantha acknowledged.

  Desdemona felt as though somehow she was losing, and that gave her a panicky feeling. How could this be? She was the strong one, the powerful one.

  “What do you want from me?” Desdemona demanded, angry, resentful, and more than a little defensive. The other woman was so calm, maddeningly so. Desdemona remembered a period of time in her own life when she’d been that way. She’d learned to be still, almost dead inside, as a defense mechanism to avoid punishment, judgment from her mother and the others. She’d learned that in a roomful of passionate people, stillness could be the most intimidating thing in the world.

  Then had come that terrible night and she had lost that stillness. Hate and anger had taken over and she had understood in a flash the kind of power they could give her. They had helped her overcome her own crippling fear when those around her were cowering on the floor sobbing. They had allowed her to do the most wondrous magic she’d ever dreamed of. They’d given her power.

  And then, so soon after, she had lost herself forever to this specter who sat across from her. What was worse, this specter had the calm she had lost. Desdemona bared her teeth at her other self, hating her with all she had in her.

  “I want to understand you, to not be afraid of you anymore,” Samantha said. “And I want to be able to forgive you, me, us.”

  “I don’t need your forgiveness,” Desdemona hissed.

  “Maybe you don’t need it, but I do,” Samantha said.

  There was something so sincere about her that it made Desdemona stop and think. “You solve crimes for a living,” she said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To help the world make sense, to bring closure to people who have had terrible experiences.”

  “Like us.”

  Samantha nodded.

  Desdemona waved her hand and willed the picture of the stolen necklace into being. She showed it to Samantha. “Do you remember getting this picture, finding it buried in the grave m
eant for . . . us . . . in Salem?”

  “It’s the last thing I remember clearly,” Samantha said.

  Desdemona nodded. “I need to find the witch who left that picture.”

  “Then you’re going to need me.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I thought you viewed fear as weakness,” Samantha said, raising an eyebrow.

  Desdemona had never hated her so much as she did in that moment. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “I do. That’s why I need to get over it. At the abandoned amusement park today, a witch killed a lot of people with powers. She literally stripped them of their magic, pulled it out of them. It killed them. Worse, it accelerated the decomposition. It was only the magic she was pulling, not energy.”

  Samantha pursed her lips. “That would imply that the life force, the very essence of a person with power, is tied to that power.”

  “That’s what it seemed like.”

  “So what she was really taking was a piece of their soul almost, and without it they could not survive.”

  Desdemona blinked. “You think magic is tied to a person’s soul?”

  Samantha shrugged. “It’s the only thing that explains what you witnessed.”

  “I’m not sure if I believe in that.”

  Samantha actually chuckled. “Given everything you’ve seen, that seems . . . ironic. Tell me what you can about the witch we’re hunting.”

  “I’m hunting,” Desdemona corrected. “I suspect it was the same one as today. It takes a lot of power to pull off the things she’s been doing.”

  “In San Francisco I saw her able to puppeteer other witches just like marionettes,” Samantha said. “She is indeed very strong and completely without conscience.”

  “That’s how you think of me,” Desdemona realized.

  Samantha nodded.

  “Why?”

  “What happened when we were twelve? What happened the day the demon killed the entire coven?” Samantha asked.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  Samantha shook her head.

  “Are you sure you don’t know what happened that day?” Desdemona pressed.