Death's Hand (24 page)

“A falchion is meant to be wielded with a shield,” Isaac had said as Elise studied her birthday presents with grave seven year old eyes.

“Then why two?” she asked.

“Because you don’t need a shield if you kill everything that approaches you.”

She still wondered if that meant Isaac never intended for her to have an aspis. Elise got the impression he would have disapproved of her partnership with James, and the lengths to which she would now go to recover him. She didn’t care. Her father was a bastard anyway.

The magical engravings on the blade shimmered with more than the light when she took it in her hand. Elise swung the kopis through the air, slashing it at an invisible enemy. It felt strange to wield without its twin.

The back sheath was in a drawer at the bottom of the safe. Elise slung it on like a backpack and had to loosen the straps to make it fit.

Sheathed, the hilt of the sword protruded over her right shoulder. She flipped her hair back to hide it.

When she examined herself in the bathroom mirror, she couldn’t see the sword, and the straps of the sheath looked innocuous enough. But her swollen, bruised face was all too familiar.

Elise didn’t realize she had lashed out at the mirror until her reflection fractured. Glass sprinkled on the countertop.

“Damn it, James,” she whispered as her knuckles bled through her gloves.

This was all his fault.

If she started hunting again, there would be no going back. No second retirement. Maybe she had been naïve to think she could have left it the first time.

She swept out of the apartment and didn’t look back.

XVII

Ann clenched her fist, and the city grew silent.

The matter of calming people was simple. Press magic against the right part of the mind, and a person would grow lethargic. Press again, and they became all but comatose. Another press… well, it would be a long time before someone woke up from that.

Ann had once been too weak with her akashic magic to calm a single person, but it had grown easier with time. Now, with the full force of
vedae som matis
behind her, she felt she could silence the world itself.

But the world was not her goal. Even the entire city was more than she needed for the time being. She envisioned only the surrounding neighborhoods and lulled them to silence. Normal people would panic if they saw Ann’s demons and reanimated dead on the streets. With a calm laid over them, they felt nothing. She could operate in the day as easily as the night.

She was so
powerful
now. The universe’s energy flowed through her veins, hot as molten lava.

Rain sluiced down the attic’s lone window. The fading gray light was barely enough for Ann to make out her surroundings, but she knew her workspace well. She could have navigated it in absolute darkness. The only new addition was the pale form on her work table—a man so tall his feet dangled off the end.

Ann found her pen and nibs exactly where she had left them on the desk at the end of the attic. She paused to glance in her small ritual mirror—her nose was twisted, swollen, red, and her eyes were rimmed with dark purple bruises. Elise had mangled it with a few well-placed kicks, and Ann wasn’t the right kind of witch to heal it.

She collected the special ink
vedae som matis
had instructed her to make and took it to the table. She studied the face of James, her high priest, in half-darkness. The poison worked so deep into his body that organs began to fail, and he looked very old. Deep lines furrowed his skin, accenting the faint hints of gray at his temples. His temperature was so high that Ann could feel it from inches away. The edges of his lips were blue.

The poison made it impossible for him to escape while Ann prepared, but once he housed
vedae som matis
, the demon would burn the illness from his blood. He would heal in moments, and James would be the perfect vessel. With maintenance, his body would last for centuries to come.

And Ann would be right there to witness it.

“I need my straight razor,my strai Ann said as she shook the ink bottle, and her smallest helper, the girl once known as Lucinde, went to find it. “And a light, please.”

The lamp on her desk clicked on. The room was filled with a pale pink glow. A huge sigil anointed the floor, drawn in the same mixture of blood that marked the basement.

James didn’t stir when Ann touched the silver nib to his forehead. She drew intricate symbols on his face, repeatedly checking both to make sure she was drawing them correctly.

She cleaned a clumped fleck of red ink off James’s brow and let her fingertips trace on his skin. Ann couldn’t wait until her mistress had a body at long last. She was grateful that they had failed to prepare Lucinde properly. Ann could ignore a man’s body as long as it was
vedae som matis
inside. She wouldn’t have been able to deal with her mistress appearing as a five-year-old.

Ann moved down his body, writing the specific marks of transference on each critical point of his flesh. In order to preserve James for as long as they could, she had to inscribe over two dozen marks. She drew one carefully on his left shoulder atop a brilliant white scar he bore just over his chest.

Her smallest helper returned with the straight razor.

“Thank you,” she said, brushing her hand across the top of the child-servant’s head. “You can go sit in the corner again.” Ann didn’t watch to make sure she would obey. They always did.

Ann flipped open the straight razor and sliced it through the waist of his pants and down the legs. The cloth fell open as a snake shedding its skin.

A twinge of guilt clenched in Ann’s gut as she cut away his trousers, removing James’s last semblance of dignity. Although she had never been close to her high priest, or even that fond of him, she knew he and Elise were close. It was obvious they adored one another. She would be devastated.

The kopis is the enemy
, Death’s Hand reminded Ann, brushing her mind.
She will not share in our vision. She will not accept your offer to join us
.

Ann didn’t reply. Betty wouldn’t share in her vision, either—or so
vedae som matis
insisted. Death’s Hand had deployed a fiend to kill Betty without asking Ann, and now one of her creatures was dead. She was still angry, but she sensed the demon’s jealousy—the worry that Ann would find she preferred human company. Ann tried not to feel too pleased with that.
Vedae som matis
’s jealousy made her feel wanted, and it was hard not to preen a little.

Marisa has betrayed us. I must kill her.

“No,” Ann said. “I don’t want anyone else to die if they don’t have to. You know I’m still mad you sent one of our babies to attack Anthony and Betty.”

Her voice turned soothing.
It was necessary. I knew they would get in the way, and if you could see what they are doing now, you would agree. They are coming to kill me.

“They can’t,” she said. “They wouldn’t.”

But the demon had already subsided from her mind, leaving her with a sense of the inevitable. Marisa wasn’t a big deal anyway. She had served her purpose.
Vedae som matis
wouldn’t kill anyone that didn’t need to die—right?

She resumed preparing James, trimming the thatch of pubic hair over his genitalia so she could properly access the skin beneath. She carefully tried not to look at his naked body. Ann wasn’t interested in the sexual sense, but it was so
distracting
trying to draw so close to a penis. She suppressed the insane urge to giggle.

He would be ready soon. She would only need the anointing oil, and perhaps a few herbs…

The clock chimed. Ten o’clock. Elise would be in the cemetery soon.

Ann smiled and continued to work.

“How’s it looking?”

Betty leaned on the Jeep’s roll cage to support her elbows, peering through a set of black binoculars. She hummed at Elise’s question, lips pursed.

They were positioned in the driveway of a sports complex across the street from Our Mother of Sorrows. Even though they had been parked at the edge of a busy road for twenty minutes, not a single car had passed.

The view from their side of the five lane road wasn’t good—the statue at the entrance of the cemetery was in the way, along with a few well-placed trees, and Elise could only barely see the illuminated angel statue in the back of the cemetery through the obstructions. “Hmm,” Betty said, fidgeting with the focus. “Interesting.”

“What?”

“It looks very black. Almost like it’s nighttime and I can’t see anything.”

Elise grabbed the strap. “Hand them over. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not using them wrong and I can do reconnaissance all on my own, thank you very much!”

Anthony made an irritated noise and slouched in the driver’s seat, folding his arms. His feet sloshed in the half inch of water that had collected at the bottom of his Jeep.

It was hard to maintain a good mood outdoors in the middle of a rainy night, and Elise felt like she had been here, doing the exact same thing with James, just hours ago. James. The thought of him quickly erased any semblance of amusement that might have been growing in response to Betty’s exploits.

Elise took the binoculars from her eyes.

“Hey!” Betty protested.

“It’s almost ten. We don’t have time for this.” She gazed through the eyepieces, searching for the street lights around the cemetery. At first, all she saw were tombstones, and then she began making out moving shadows behind them. The shapes were faint, but she could guess what she was looking at.

She lowered the binoculars. “The possessed ones are already here,” she said, passing them to Anthony.

“What does that mean for us?” he asked.

“It bet it means Ann and James are there.”

“Does that change the plan at all?” Betty asked, dropping into her seat.

“She’s probably ordered her servants to take the artifact as soon as we show up. So no, this doesn’t change anything. We stick to Plan A.”

“I hate to be a party pooper, because you know I’m your girl whenever you want to be destructive, but don’t you think Plan A is a little noisy for an ordinary neighborhood?” Betty asked. “
Somebody
is bound to wake up and call the cops.”

“Ann lives nearby. I think she’s been casting a calming on her neighbors in the surrounding streets. It’s the only way I can figure she can get away with sending out her servants without drawing attention.”

“A calming?”

“It’s a kind of spell that compels people to go to sleep,” she said. “James can do it to one or two people at a time. With her soul bound to a demon, it wouldn’t be hard to do it on a broad scale.”

“So I get to break things?” Anthony asked.

Elise nodded. “You get to break things.”

“That’s almost cool enough for me to stop being completely petrified,” he said. “I do have to wonder, though—why did we bring that thing with us at all?”

“The demon is in it,” Elise said, patting her pocket. “Part of it, anyway. It’s watching. If we left it at Motion and Dance, we wouldn’t have demons
or
Ann to fight here at all—they would be at the studio. We’re not that important.”

“They tried to kill me,” Betty said, bracing herself against the additional bars they had welded to the roll cage. “I’m way important.”

Elise sighed. “Do it, Anthony.”

XVIII

Just meters away, the possessed ones wandered through the cemetery. They moved aimlessly without acknowledging one another, vacant eye sockets glazed with mucus.

Occasionally, one of the servants would pass by the grave in which his body had lain, and he would pause, the faintest hint of recognition lighting up his face. Then the light would fade, and he would shuffle off once more.

The old grave markers were soaked and dark, and water puddled in the eroded faces of the more recent headstones. A breeze rustled through the trees, and fell again moments later. Our Mother of Sorrows was silent.

And then, distantly… “Woo hoo!”

Crash
.

The fence smashed open and Anthony’s Jeep exploded into the graveyard.

Elise’s recorded voice roared out of the speakers bound to the front. The large crucifix forming the hood ornament blazed in the darkness. A length of fence stuck to the crude cowcatcher, and it clipped a shambling old woman, sending her flying.

“
Crux sacra sit mihi lux, non draco sit mihi dux
!”

Pain roared from the throats of the possessed ones. They twitched and flailed as though taken by a massive seizure, clawing at their own faces. Blood spilled underneath their nails, unable to feel anything but the pain of St. Benedict’s prayer.

Anthony peeled through the paths of the cemetery at twenty miles an hour, skidding around tight corners intended for pedestrians.

“
Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana
!”

A shaking body—a teenager, only a boy—clawed at the side of the Jeep. His hand caught, and he was dragged alongside them, fighting to climb on board even as his entire body shuddered with pain.