The witches had somehow created a protective barrier. I knew better than to try and get to them that way again. Guess it was going to be Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. I walked toward them, unbuttoning my coat as I did. Cold or not, I wanted my arms free and easy access to my knives. I dropped the coat on the ground.
They took this as a signal to uncross their arms and spread their feet apart. My nose was still dripping, so I wiped it with the back of my hand and flung the blood off to my right. I grinned at them and pulled my knives from the wrist sheaths. Surprise actually widened the beady eyes of Little Head before he shook that head at me in warning. The other one pointed to the stage and I looked up to find every witch and wizard looking at me. Their arms were still raised, their mouths still moved in song, but glowing blue eyes all locked on me.
The chill that crawled up my back felt like a permanent thing.
I looked back and forth between the bouncers and the witches, trying to figure out the quickest path to whatever that thing was behind them. I took too long to decide. A wave of some kind of electrical energy hit me. Hard. I flew so far back I hit a tree limb before crashing to the ground. Black spilled into my mind.
When I came to, I was curled up on the ground, freezing, and I had no idea what had happened. I sat up, scooched back against a tree and looked around. The world spun around me, the sunlight sparkling off the leaves and ground gave me a headache. Dead leaves. Piles and piles of dead leaves. I felt the tree behind me and that hum of magic was completely gone. All the trees around me had turned dark gray and looked as though they’d been dead for years.
Just like the last forest, some of the roots looked like they’d been pulled from the ground and they clutched the surface of the earth as if they’d tried to hang on to their stolen lives. This forest had been destroyed. I touched a root next to me and felt nothing but a dry, hollow blackness.
My body felt alien, my legs watery. I crawled forward through trash that had been left everywhere. Red plastic cups and paper plates and napkins littered the entire area. The stage was gone, the trailers that had been behind it were gone.
Then I saw a body with blonde curls. Choking on a sob, I kept crawling toward her, moving slowly because my muscles felt like they weren’t a part of my body. Part of me knew it wasn’t Blythe. She had no white coat and her limbs were skinny and malnourished looking. I got to her and turned her over. Green eyes, not blue, stared blankly at the sky. Her thin hand lay palm up on top of a piece of paper, her fingers dry, wrinkled husks. I picked up the paper to find a concert flyer I hadn’t seen the night before.
I now knew where the next concert was going to be.
But this girl, the one Blythe and I had spoken to last night, would be going to no more concerts. I’d promised Blythe we’d help her. Guilt, something I was becoming too familiar with, stabbed into my chest. If we’d given her one of the witch’s herbs, would she have survived last night?
Blythe!
With terror knocking against my ribs, I forced my legs to function and I stood to scan the area for her. I told myself she hadn’t been unhealthy and worn out from attending other concerts, that it was obvious the dead girl had been fed from one too many times. But still, my heart beat a frantic pace as I searched for Blythe. “Phro?”
The goddess appeared, wearing that stupid white dress, her expression drawn, her form translucent. She pointed and I saw Blythe stumbling around in the trees. Exhaustion pulled at my limbs as I walked toward her, so happy to see her alive and well it chased away the sadness of the other girl’s death. Blythe was walking in a circle, mumbling to herself, her new coat streaked with dirt. I touched her shoulder and she jumped and screamed.
“Shh,
goddess
,
you’ve got a set of pipes on you.”
“I’m so sorry! I don’t know what happened, how I got so drunk. I’m not very good with alcohol so I don’t drink much. Once, when I was sixteen, I went to this party at my high school and they’d put all this fruit into a big metal tub and poured some kind of alcohol all over it and it was so good, I ate three peaches. The next thing I remember is throwing up all over Sophie, then having the council do a healing spell because I couldn’t stop throwing up. I puked all over the head wizard. Wait…what about Sophie?” She paused, blinked at me. “Did you see her?”
I’d just remained quiet until she got her story out. It was better that way sometimes and I was too tired to fight it. “We both did. You pointed her out. But I couldn’t get to her.” My phone rang and I dug it out of my pocket and nearly dropped it. My hands were still shaky. “Yeah,” I barked into it.
My brother’s voice dripped pure anger. “Beri, what the hell happened last night? I felt…I don’t know what it was. It was like you were pulling on me. I’ve been calling for hours. Even Elsa is pissed.”
“She should be used to me not answering my phone. And, hey, it’s going to be like that sometimes. I won’t always be able to pick up if I’m in the middle of an investigation.” My head began to throb.
“I get it,” he said. “I do. But this was different. It was this powerful feeling. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it felt like you’d stuck your hands into my chest and were trying to pull out my heart.”
“Ouch. I’m surprised you felt that.” I gripped the phone. Shocked would be a better description. Just how connected were we? “Blythe and I went to the concert. Turns out some kind of creature has the witches in thrall. When they sang, the audience went into a trance. And Castor, when I went into the next dimension, I could see energy being pulled from all of them. Even the forest is drained. I don’t know…it was like the creature pulled powerful magic from the earth and filtered it through the people.”
“So you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Just feel hungover.” I smiled at the worry thickening his voice, though he couldn’t see. “I’m thinking this was some kind of succubus.”
“Hold on, let me see if Dooby might have an idea.”
Castor must have tried to cover the phone with his hand or something because all I heard then were muffled background noises. I watched Blythe mutter and pace. Then she noticed the state of her new coat and frowned, running her hands over it.
Castor came back on. “Dooby says succubi feed off sexual energy.”
“Trust me, there was a lot of that in this crowd. But it was more than that. The witches’ voices did something to the audience or the forest.”
“So what happened to you?” Worry deepened his tone. “I know you were hurt.”
I winced as the pain in my head increased. “I got knocked out. I tried to get to the stage, but together they make some kind of barrier. It’s powerful.” Leaning against a tree, I sighed, so tired I felt it in every part of my body. “Can you and Dooby go through that book and see if you can figure out if there’s more to her story? I’m pretty sure she’s the succubus Nikolos said his jailer was upset about losing. She had to have escaped during the Dweller battle. Phro confirmed she was from the underworld, so she’s probably not a run-of-the-mill succubus. Oh, and she had some sort of golden crown on her head if that helps.”
“We’ll go through Nikolos’s books too.” He was quiet a moment. “Take care, Beri.”
“I will, and thanks. I hope you find the information because there’s not much time. The next concert is tomorrow night.”
Chapter Nine
“Can’t sleep? Me neither. Too bad I don’t have any warm goat’s milk.”
I lifted my face off my pillow enough to glare at Blythe with one eye. “You are officially the queen of non sequiturs.” Of course we couldn’t sleep. But we had to try, despite the fact it was the middle of the day.
Her covers rustled as she propped her head up on one hand. “When I was younger and couldn’t sleep because I missed my mother so much, Sophie would run me a bath and add warm goat’s milk to it. Worked every time.”
“I don’t need a bath. I’m just worried about falling asleep. I don’t want to go back to the hell dimension where Nikolos is, and yet I do so badly I’m keeping myself awake.”
“I could make you a dream pillow,” she said through a wide yawn. “I have patchouli and catnip in my bag.”
What a mix. “No patchouli. That shit stinks. And not now, Blythe. We need to recover from whatever that music or that woman on the stage did to us. I still feel really weak and I hate that.” I closed my eyes. “I don’t want to go to the hell dimension in this state because I have a feeling Nikolos is going to be worse and I won’t be able to fight him.”
Blythe’s sigh was loud. “I’ll make you a dream pillow tomorrow. I need softer materials anyway. I can use linden blossoms or even marjoram instead of the patchouli.”
My eyes popped back open as I remembered something important. “Did you call Rory while I was in the shower to see if they know where we can get medieval costumes?” The bouncers, witches and wizards had seen me last night. If I was going to get anywhere near that stage, I’d have to blend. “Remind me that we need to pick up earplugs too.”
“Rory said that Tea Bag is good at finding things and will get costumes for each of us.”
“Good. Hopefully Dooby and Castor will figure out what we’re up against and how to get to her. Oh, did the vamp tell you where he was hiding out?”
“No, but he did say he wouldn’t leave.”
I blew out a long breath, hating this weird exhaustion that stemmed from being someone’s food. Or filter for her food, I didn’t know which. “I have got to sleep so I’m ready to face your Sophie too.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“She’s your mentor, isn’t she?”
“She’s also like my parent. I just told you about the goat’s milk. She did a lot of things like that. I love her.”
I sat up, smoothed the covers over my lap. “I can’t think of one reason why she’d spend your entire life teaching you to suppress your true magic. Then she just let you out there in the world. If you’d had the right teaching, you’d have known how to call that fire elemental and how to control it. There’s no way your Sophie didn’t know you have fire magic as well as earth. Hell, Blythe, you’re a fantastic healer too. Think what you could do by now if she hadn’t made you believe all you were good enough for is running a magic shop and putting together small earth spells.”
Her lips twisted. Blythe scratched her nose. She’d added a pink heart ring on her finger next to the pentagram. “I can’t help but love her, Beri. She took me in. She’s the closest thing I have to family.” She suddenly smiled, big eyes all liquid, even from across the room. “Well, she was. Now I have you and Castor, and maybe even Elsa.”
The corner of my mouth turned up. I thought about how many times I’d caught Blythe cuddled up to my brother. “Yeah, I guess you do.”
She scrambled from the bed and ran across the room to dig through her bag before pulling out a baggie with brown herbs. “Let’s just slide this marjoram into your pillow. It should block your dreams.”
“Thanks.” Luckily, it worked.
Four hours of sleep wasn’t nearly enough, but I felt better as we walked to Perk and Work. Blythe looked fantastic in her jeans and pink sweater, like she’d slept twice the amount of time she had.
“Rory said they even found something that will fit you.” Blythe stepped onto the sidewalk and frowned at a black husk of a bush—one she’d set on fire during my fight with the Kuru-Pira. “He also said it was badass.”
“Great,” I muttered as I tugged open the door to the fake cyber cafe. A wave of pepperoni and cheese odors hit me and my stomach growled. Loudly. Blythe and I had managed to sleep until four, and even though we’d stopped for food on our way back to the motel this morning, I felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. The kids had covered one entire table with at least six boxes of pizza.
Rory looked up from his laptop and grinned. “Have a slice! And wait until you see what we found for you.”
“Oh my goodness!” Blythe dropped her bag and rushed across the room to stroke her hands down a yellow dress. I hoped that one was hers. Because of the color, yeah, but mostly because of the length. It would reach my knees and I doubted medieval women went for the shorter skirts. But it was a gorgeous vision in crushed lemon velvet with a red satin inset. The sleeves were lined with the red and had lace crisscrossing the upper sleeves while the lower parts were open so they’d drape around her wrists.
“Yours is behind it,” Rory mumbled around the huge bite of pizza he’d shoved into his mouth. “Sarah tried to jack it.”
“Did not,” Sarah snapped. She never took her eyes from her computer screen. “I just wanted to try it on.”
“Thing draped her head to foot. Was funny. She looked like a sprite.” Rory’s green eyes sparkled and it wasn’t my imagination that they lingered on Sarah with more than just friendship. Then his grin faded and I knew he’d remembered Fenris.
Guess Blythe had as well because she turned to me. “Oh, speaking of sprites, I found ours. He was sleeping in the little box. I don’t even know how he got into the motel room, but I packed him in one of the drawers. I left the latch open.”
“You have a sprite?” Sarah looked up, scowled. “In a box, in a drawer? Why would you do that? Don’t you know they hate being enclosed and in the dark?”
I smirked. “We’ll let you meet him tonight. You’ll understand. He can only come out at night.”