“If you’re still feeling sick, you can just stay here and nap. I’d appreciate if you’d refrain from throwing up all over everything.”
“It’s not my stomach. I told you, I’m fine on short trips.”
“Cold?” I pointed over my shoulder. “There’s a thicker coat in the back. I brought along a couple of Nikolos’s. The jacket would work better because you’d probably trip over the long coat.”
“It’s not too cold. I just hate forests.”
I turned in my seat so I could see her better. “You’re an earth witch. How can you hate forests? Think of all the cool herbs you find in them.”
“When Sophie took over as my mentor, she told me something bad happened to me in a forest. She never let me near them when I was growing up. When we went into Big Cypress Swamp, I was so scared.”
“We all were. Demons and fire elementals and stolen souls are all scary things. If it makes you feel any better, I’m afraid of fire elementals and I’m getting ready to face another.”
She frowned, stared out the window. “Let’s just get it over with.”
I waited for her usual jumble of words to spill from her mouth, but she was strangely silent. I thought rambling Blythe got on my nerves, but quiet Blythe was
too
unnerving.
We got out of the Jeep and right away, the air in the forest pricked along my skin, a static caress that bordered on pain. There was a coldness to it that didn’t breathe crisp or clean, as winter air should. This felt more like slush—dirty, cold and wet. I wanted to hold my breath to keep it out of my lungs.
Leaves crunched underfoot, but no other usual forest sounds were present. I didn’t see any squirrels or birds, nothing to make this part of the woods feel normal. The clearing wasn’t far from the dirt road and I could see where the stage had been set up by the deep indentions in the ground and the crushed bushes. It was like they’d thrown everything up without regard for the life here. Red plastic cups littered the ground along with paper plates and other trash.
“Nobody cleaned it up?” Blythe stepped around me and knelt. “This was a place of magic. Not the good kind.” She shuddered and her paleness from earlier returned with a vengeance.
With one step into the forest, I’d understood why the witches had set their concert here. I knelt and dug my fingers into the freezing soil. Dark ripples moved up my arm. I flicked the dirt off and scrubbed my hands on my jeans, but the blackness remained, alive and hungry.
The woods had housed an ancient magic.
Deep and ugly, nothing like the friendly, curious magic of Nikolos’s ley line. No, this place had been fed on darker helpings. It was visible in the gray-tinged bark and the rotting, alarmingly small piles of shriveled, cracking leaves. The trees held on with a desperation one could see in the roots, which had literally crawled above the dirt as if gasping for clean air because of an earth too tainted for nutrients. They twisted and snarled along the surface. I expected them to take on life—wrap around my ankles, suck me below and smother me into fertilizer.
I was nothing’s food.
Catching Blythe trembling out of the corner of my eye, it occurred to me that in her current state, the little witch could very easily end up a meal. I tightened my hands into fists. Not on my watch, she wouldn’t. “Blythe, do you have any herbs in that silly bag that could numb you to this place?”
She met my eyes, her own fixed and glassy as if she was already being pulled under.
Frowning, I snapped my fingers in front of her face. “Hey, shake it off!”
She blinked, shuddered, and her mouth tightened as she reached out to stroke one hand down the trunk of a dead blackjack oak. “Sophie taught me this rhyme when I was three.
The spill of dark magic
Upon our Mother Earth
Renders blood and death
In place of rebirth.”
She wrapped her arms around her middle. “This place, Beri, is so long past rebirth. What kind of person does such a thing?”
I curled my lip. “Probably the kind who teaches a toddler such a rhyme.”
“All young witches and wizards are taught rhymes like that.”
“Blythe, we already know that Sophie has been lying to you. And look at this!” I pointed to the dead tree beside us. “Look at what that group did to the woods. It looks like this covers a lot of territory. What are they doing to drain the earth’s energy like this?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. And yes, I do think Sophie has lied to me, but there has to be a good reason. She loves me like a mother. You’ll see and understand when you meet her.”
“Doubt it. But none of that matters this instant.” I slipped my dagger from the wrist sheath and knelt to cut one of the overgrown roots. “Maybe that vamp can tell us what happened to the forest. From the looks of that warehouse, he kept a lot of his sprite magic.” I stood, slipping the knife back into the sheath then putting the root in my jacket pocket. “We need to get back, get on your computer and figure out where they went next.”
I hurried toward the Jeep, wanting out of this sad, dead forest but before I got to the road, I saw a shimmer in the air. Stopping, I peeled the dimensional layers and what I saw froze the breath in my already cold lungs. A boy and girl stood in front of us, the girl in a long medieval-type dress, the boy in jeans and a flowing buccaneer’s shirt. They didn’t speak. I’d seen enough murdered spirits over the years to recognize them on sight. But where was the killer? Victims were tied to their killers until their murders were solved. If the witches did this, the ghosts would have been with them. With so much of the woods dead, the sound around us was muted, but when I cocked my head and really focused, all I heard was the sound of something rustling deeper into the forest. Every atom of my body told me we were not prepared to face that noise.
“Hey, Blythe? Run for the Jeep.”
She’d been around me long enough to know to go. No questions, just a jump into movement I found admirable. She didn’t have long legs, but she could run—even in her silly slippers.
I breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the road and climbed into my vehicle. When Phro appeared next to Blythe, Blythe screamed, then scowled at the goddess. “I hate when you do that. Can’t you warn me or something?”
One black eyebrow went up. “And how would a spirit do that, hmm? My disembodied voice wouldn’t scare you?”
Blythe tilted her head, opened her mouth, then must have seen the ridiculousness of arguing with that solid point so she shut it and made a
harrumph
noise instead. “Why did we run anyway?”
“There are dead spirits and something even bigger was headed our way. Had a feeling we didn’t want to meet up with it.”
“I’ll check it out,” Phro said and disappeared again.
Blythe napped on the way back to the motel. I’d guessed right. We had about an hour before the vamp would probably wake up. I didn’t think he could get out of the box, but if he did, it would take a while for him to chew through the sweatshirt I’d wrapped around the box.
I pulled us in front of Perk and Work, grinning when Blythe’s giggles sounded from the backseat. “Yeah, it’s a bad name, but I have a feeling the Wi-Fi rocks because there were a lot of teenagers here earlier.”
She grabbed her laptop and walked into the place ahead of me. As I stepped in, all conversation stopped. Two kids, who’d been leaning over another’s shoulder to see his monitor, straightened immediately. The one sitting minimized his window fast.
I so did not care if they’d been looking at porn. What I did care about was the scent of coffee. There was one fancy-looking coffee machine behind the bar, but nothing else that suggested this was a cafe. Nothing on the walls, no menus. “Is this a coffee shop or a place to use Wi-Fi?”
The girl I’d seen earlier with the spiky white hair cleared her throat. “We’re not actually o—”
She shut up when the boy in the brown leather jacket stood up and elbowed her. “You can use the Wi-Fi. There’s no charge for it or for the coffee. Brock, you wanna make some fresh?”
Blythe, like me, hovered near the door. I met her gaze and shrugged before looking back at the kids. “Sorry. We thought this was a public cafe.”
“It used to be. We just never get customers, so it’s more of a place to hang out now.”
I immediately wanted to know how it stayed open then, but decided to let it go. We needed their Internet. Blythe moved to a back table and I sat next to her. A kid who stood as tall as me—Brock, I assumed—started grinding coffee beans and working that pot with all the careful consideration of a scientist in a lab. The scent of dark roast joined the burnt-wire odor of hot electronics. Two teens who looked around sixteen sat with their chairs leaning against the wall, game controllers in their hands and earphones on their heads. The boy who’d spoken seemed a little older, possibly eighteen. He sat back down next to the girl. Both of them watched us.
“The band website changed,” Blythe whispered. “There’s a new video up.” She opened her bag and pulled out a pair of earbuds.
I was no longer surprised by anything that came out of that bag. I took one of the buds, stuck it in my ear and I leaned over to watch. Once again, beautiful voices sang in harmony and as before, their faces were blurred. “I don’t get it. It’s nearly an identical video. I think even the song is the same. The only difference is the background, but even then it’s just a different forest.”
Blythe shut off the music. “I’ll keep searching.”
“The next concert location has to be somewhere. How else would they sell tickets?” I smiled at the kid who set two mugs of coffee down on the table next to us. “I’d like to pay for the coffee at least.”
“No need,” he said, his voice as big as his shoulders. “Rory’s uncle gives it to us free.”
I took a sip and fought the urge to roll back my eyes and slump to the floor. “Wow. It’s good.”
Rory, the boy in the leather jacket, spoke up. “Brock makes it the best. We have creamers in a mini-fridge out back there if you want some.”
“It’s fine. I would like to ask you all a few questions, though. Do you know anything about a recent Staglina concert?” Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Phro’s appearance. She crossed her arms before looking around the room.
“A little.” He shrugged, but didn’t meet my eyes. His hands fidgeted on his lap. “We heard about the police going out there to break it up.”
The kid had lied to me. Didn’t blame him. I was just some stranger who’d walked in to mooch coffee. So I decided to try a little honesty. “A friend of ours got mixed up with the band and we’re trying to find her. It’s important. We think she’s in danger.”
Rory looked at the blonde girl and she nodded and went into a back room. He turned back to me. “We actually know a lot about the band. Well, as much as anyone can find on the Net. We’ve been tracking the concerts and have a map and list of people who’ve gone missing at some of them.”
“Really.” I set down the mug. “All that. Why?”
“An online friend of ours is one of the missing kids. We started digging and”—he looked around the room—“let’s just say we all share an interest in unusual things and we’re all really good at finding stuff on the Net.”
I got the strangest feeling right then.
Surely not.
Blythe getting sick at that section of highway and me thinking I’d spotted Fred in front of this motel. I glanced over at a silent Phro who had strangely enough kept her mouth shut in here. She stared back, her eyebrows high in question.
Shivers danced over my spine.
Had Fred been able to appear long enough to lead me to these kids? The coincidence of them being into “unusual things” was too damned big to swallow easily.
I peeled into the dimensions, looking for the kids’ spirit guides and found them milling about near the coffee machine, all watching me. I wished I could ask them questions, but from experience knew most spirit guides wouldn’t share anything about their charges and besides, I wouldn’t be garnering trust from these teens by suddenly talking to empty spaces. To keep from being distracted by the extra spirits, I pushed back out of their dimension, blocking sight of Phro as I did.
The girl came back into the room and handed Rory some papers.
“That’s Sarah,” Rory murmured, looking through the papers. “She’s the one who first started following Staglina.” He squinted at one sheet. “One of these has the place we think the next concert is. We’d planned to go to the last one but had car trouble. Tea Bag drives a piece of shit.”
One of the kids with a controller threw a wadded-up paper at Rory. “Hey now. At least I have a piece of shit to drive.”
Rory nodded. “True.”
Before he could say anything else, another girl slammed into the cafe. Her cheeks were ruddy with cold, her long black hair wild about her head and her eyes had a look I recognized all too well. Terror. “There’s something like a bear in the parking lot.”
Every teen jumped up and ran to the window. One of the gamers knocked over a stack of books. He jumped the pile and pressed his hands and face to the glass. “That’s no damned bear.”
I caught a streak of brown through the parking lot and figured out pretty quickly that whatever was out there moved too fast for a bear…or a human. I pulled my dagger and Nikolos’s from my wrist sheaths.