“Chop some firewood, boy.” Her voice carried easily over the quiet sounds of birds and crickets in the shin-high grass. “When you’re done, meet me by the stove.” She stepped toward the front door.
The pile of firewood off to the side of the house seemed to be laughing at me. “Can’t we just use some of the wood that’s already chopped?”
Her silhouette paused and turned. She was silent as she turned away again and stepped inside.
“Take that as a no,” I muttered to myself. I sighed and walked off to the nearby shed where my old friend, a heavy double-bladed axe, still hung by its head. Tool of destruction in hand, I headed to the edge of the woods to gather some fallen logs. The hoot of a barn owl sounded like thunder in the blackening night.
I smiled as I set the axe aside and grabbed the end of a long dead tree trunk. A few grunts pulled it far enough out of the surrounding wood to get to work. It didn’t take long to hack the foot-thick log into more manageable foot-long cylinders. I stacked three of the logs in my left arm, grabbed the axe with my right hand, and headed for the stump just to the east of the cabin.
After butchering the first log to kindling, I got my rhythm back. I hadn’t chopped wood at the cabin in almost ten years. What was I, sixteen or seventeen back then? Zola used to call it punishment. I laughed to myself. I was too stupid at the time to realize she was using it to help me work off some rage and frustration after a few of our training sessions gone wrong.
As the axe came down again and the fourth log split seamlessly down the middle with a satisfying crack, I remembered …
“You see it boy?”
I nodded while my eyes stayed locked on the shimmering ribbon around the body. It was an old hunter. His body was decomposed badly enough I couldn’t even begin to tell what killed him.
The aura was a slow, twining span of black and white, well balanced and lacking the fuel of hatred, or stress, or pain, or love, or any other human emotion the living have. It was an aura of the dead.
“The dead have power. It may not be of great use to most of them, but it will be of great use to you.”
I was only half listening to my master. I could see where bits of the aura should have anchored to the body. More out of boredom than anything else, I focused a tiny needle of power to hook the aura back into place at the root chakra, the base of his spine, and the crown chakra at the top of his head.
Before I could do anything else, the aura flared blood red and I screamed as the body pulled a knee under itself, pushed off the ground, and leaned back against the tree. It should have fallen apart, but it didn’t. My gaze met those hollow sockets where only decay and maggots should have been. The empty depths of infinity stared back.
“What did you do, boy!” From the corner of my eye I could see Zola scrambling for something in her cloak.
The body screamed, though there was no throat left for the air to pass through. The vacant eye sockets flared with a deep blue light. I couldn’t hear the scream anymore; it was replaced by a slow, dark, laugh. A chill wracked my body to its core.
Zola dove at the abomination. Literally dove. I saw a flash of silver as she rammed something into its right eye socket.
Something escaped from the wound in a red haze. The aura snapped back into the even black and white flow of the dead. It was still anchored to the body, and the body was still standing, staring at nothing.
I, however, stared slack-jawed at my master. She claimed to have been over eighty, but there was obviously something else going on. No one should have been able to move that fast at eighty, or seventy, or thirty for that matter.
Zola’s gaze wandered up and down the body, and then she grimaced. “Well, boy, Ah guess today you’re going to learn how to deal with zombies. Go get the axe.”
I carried a pile of firewood through the door in both arms, laughing.
“What’s so amusing, boy?” Zola said as she cocked an eyebrow. She stood close to the wood stove.
“I was thinking about the hunter. Do you remember that?”
She raised her eyebrows slowly, her forehead crinkled and her eyes smiled. “Of course Ah do, Damian. How could any teacher forget such stupidity?”
I shrugged and smiled, setting the firewood beside the stove. Well, she did have a point.
“It is odd you should bring up the hunter.”
I added two logs to the black woodstove and shut the creaky stove front.
“You remember the shard Ah thrust into the creature?”
I nodded. “Yeah, the one with the binding ward worked into it.”
“You have a good memory.”
“Well, that kind of thing is hard to forget.”
She nodded and her hand flexed on the head of her knobby cane. “That is much like our new problem.”
We stood in the darkness, only the dim moonlight and the orange flicker of the wood stove giving us light in the small living room. The cabin filled with the smell of burning wood and Zola’s words hung in the air. “Darkness is moving Damian,” her gnarled hands shifted over the cane, “with you at its center.” I stared at her for a moment. She was still short, but with the presence of someone twice her size. She stood ramrod straight with a pile of thin braids falling past her shoulders. Tiny bits of iron and Magrasnetto, a silver gray metal, tinkled in each of those braids as she cocked her head to one side. Her eyes were intense, appraising me as I did the same. Zola’s gaze was slightly sunken below her forehead, peering out above sallow cheeks. Her body was wrapped in a deep gray cloak and her lips turned up in a smile as she waited for me to respond.
I didn’t take anything my mentor said lightly. “What have you seen?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Something Ah’ve not seen since bourré played more tables than poker.”
A passing smile twitched my lips. We used to play bourré with Sam when she’d visit.
Zola rubbed her right hand against her jaw. “Ah see demons, boy; demons all around you.”
“Why am I afraid you’re not speaking metaphorically?”
She laughed. It was rich and loud and entirely inappropriate. “There are things Ah can show you, ways to deal with demons. And you … you must listen, or you will not survive.”
I put my left fist in my right hand and bowed my head. “Yes, master.” I even managed to keep a straight face.
She laughed and slapped my shoulder hard enough to bruise. “You always were a pain in my ass.” Zola fell silent and reached into the folds of her cloak. When she removed her hand from its depths, it was gripping a small doll. The doll was plain and looked like it was made from a potato sack, stained with some blackened red substance. The Xs that passed for eyes stared at me. Utterly creepy.
“What is that? A voodoo doll?”
A vague smile crossed her face and I shivered. “It is much more than a pincushion, boy.” Her voice ground like a zombie dragged through gravel. Ah, that would be like a slow moving blend of a chain smoker and a deep, hoarse voice if you haven’t heard a zombie dragged through gravel. “Do you not see the aura, Damian?”
It was inanimate. It had never been alive. It shouldn’t have had an aura, but as soon as I focused and looked for it, it was there. A sickly mixture of black and a red so deep it could have been congealed blood. I’d never seen anything like it.
My gaze traveled up to meet Zola’s eyes. “The hell is
that?”
Her own eyes flicked down to the burlap figure. I would have sworn the thing was trying to wriggle out of her hand. “You are familiar with a fairy bottle?”
I nodded. “Nasty stuff, they can trap auras and some Fae believe they can trap souls.” Zola raised the doll closer to my face and I realized what she was saying. Her comment about the shard, she’d bound something to it. “You’re telling me something’s trapped in that?” I twisted my head away and grimaced.
“Ah would not say trapped is the best word, but it is bound to it, yes.” She lowered the doll.
I stifled a shiver. “What the hell is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
There was no avoiding it. No matter how much I didn’t want to say it, or believe it, the pulsing red and black aura could only be from one thing. “You bound a demon to it.” My voice was flat.
Her lips curled up just a little. “It is only a bit of a demon’s aura, nothing more.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, nothing more, just a bit of demon. Would you like a towel to wipe up that bit of demon?”
She laughed and turned her head. The orange glow of the fireplace cast her face into shadows.
“So why do you have it?” I asked, indicating the doll.
“Ah have learned much in the past two years, boy. There are evils beyond anything Ah ever imagined still walking this earth.” Her eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them, they dilated in the dim light, swallowing shadows. “This,” she said as she raised the doll, “is a portion of the demon you released into our plane almost ten years ago.”
I stared at the small figure in her hand. The demon
I
released?
She nodded. “The hunter, Damian. Ah am still uncertain why you were able to do it, but that was no mere spirit you stitched into its body. You didn’t just bind an aura of the dead to the body, but opened a gateway. Maybe because of the chakras you used. Ah do not know.”
“Great,” I said.
“This doll will also be training, for you and for me.”
I stared at the lifeless, squirm-inducing doll. “Training for me?”
“Yes, someone has to help banish the demons.” She smiled again, covering her face in fine, and some not so fine, laugh lines.
My stomach dropped into my shoes and my eyes locked on the doll again. “I don’t think it’s going to fight back.”
“Ah, you may be surprised.”
“Even better. Demons weren’t surprise enough?”
“If you can learn to use the aura of something tied to a demon, on purpose instead of by … accident …” she paused, her eyes shifting to the doll in her hand. “You can follow the bond back. Use that sympathetic power as an entry point. Use it as the demon’s weakness. You can learn with these.” Zola tossed the demon doll at me as she pulled another one out of her cloak.
I grimaced and caught the thing. Instead of just looking like it was trying to wriggle out of Zola’s grip, now it actually
felt
like it was trying to get out of mine. Like a fist-sized nightcrawler. Nasty. “Sympathetic power, huh? Kind of an odd word for demon-speak.”
She glared at me. I shut up. “The other doll is from another demon. A demon one of our brothers helped me bind last week.”
“Who?”
“His name is Zachariah.”
I raised an eyebrow. “As in, Zachariah the assassin guy?”
“Yes, the assassin that worked for Philip. We don’t know how many demons are loose, and we need help.”
“Where there’s one …” I said.
Zola laughed. It was empty, but we’d learned a long time ago you could laugh, smile, and shrug it off, or let someone clean your brains off the ceiling in the morning. She took a step toward the old green couch and sat down. “Yes, Damian, where there is one.” She slumped back, ran her hand over her eyes, and squeezed the bridge of her nose. I’d never seen a defeated look on Zola’s face before, and it scared the hell out of me.
I sat down on a dynamic orange chair from the 1960s. It had the texture of a pilled sweater, and my hand started picking off little orange puffballs while I watched my master. The fire crackled in the stove, doing nothing but emphasizing the silence of the room.
Within minutes, my unspoken questions burned more than the flames in the old iron stove. “Where have you been, Zola? I haven’t seen you, haven’t even heard from you in two years.” I shook my head and leaned forward. “Now you come back with stories of demons?” I half expected a sharp rebuttal from her, but none came.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up straight. The confidence I’d come to expect from my master returned to her posture and her voice. “Ah’ve been traveling to the hiding places of the war. There were demons, Damian, and not just the men who fought in wars. They walked our plane with abandon. Ah know you’ve heard me speak of Philip Pinkerton. With his help, and others on rare occasions, we banished or buried almost twenty demons through the years.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and wrapped a hand around her pale, knobby cane. “We were able to banish five from our plane. The rest were too powerful to be banished by our group. We bound them to various vessels and hid them. No one but Philip and Ah knew the location for the stranded demons.
Neither
of us knew where they all were. Philip was going to go back and destroy the vessels after learning more about the demons. At the end of the Civil War, he left for Rome. He was alive then, at the end of it all.” She stared at the embers in the wood stove as she said, “He is dead now. Ah found his body two years ago.”
My eyes widened. “Two years
?
There’s no way he’d still be alive, he’d have to be-”
She held her hand up to silence my questions. “Without Philip’s help, the demons would not have been stopped. Ah fear even now, without his help, they cannot be stopped.”
I eventually managed to close my gaping jaw and speak. “You were really around then? In the Civil War?” I shrugged and held my hand out in invitation as I said,
“How?”
“Another time, Damian. For now, we have far greater concerns. Someone is releasing the demons we bound.” She reached into another pocket hidden inside her cloak and pulled out a small pile of crumbled metallic debris. “This is all that’s left of a relic holding a greater demon. No demon, not even an arch-demon, could have broken this binding from within.
“We buried it at the Battle of New Madrid in 1862.” Her hand formed a fist around the iron detritus. Zola’s lips compressed into a tight line and she stared at me. “Damian, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
I set the demon doll down, walked to the fridge around the corner and opened the door. I crinkled my nose at the stale smell wafting from the seldom-used appliance. Four bottles of Duvel Belgian Golden Ale lined the top shelf. I grabbed two bottles and two glasses from the cabinet beside the fridge and headed back to the living room. A quick pour and I handed a glass to Zola, left the bottle by the couch, and sat down with a glass and bottle of my own.