Salem's Revenge Complete Boxed Set (10 page)

“Why do you have a sword?” she asks.

“Why do you have a gun?” I say.

She chews on her lip. “You’re not a warl,” she says.

“You’re not a witch,” I reply. Witches don’t carry guns. Why would they?

“Thanks for reminding me,” she says.

I notice a tattoo on the side of her neck. Two Chinese characters. “You want to be a witch?” I ask.

“Not really, but it would be easier being the predator than the prey.”

Fair enough. “Well, it’s been nice chatting, but we’d best be getting on our way…”

“I haven’t talked to anyone in a long time,” she says. Is that a hint of loneliness I detect?

“Neither have I.” Well, except for a strange, tongue-less bum who didn’t really talk back, and Hex, who’s not exactly the best conversationalist.

“Do you want to come upstairs for a minute?” she asks. I raise an eyebrow. Not what I expected her to say. “If you don’t do anything stupid, I won’t shoot a hole through your chest.” That’s more like it.

“I’d love to,” I say. What I really mean is,
Do I have a choice?

This girl is nuts
, I think as I trudge up the stairs in front of her, the hard metal barrel of her gun poking into my spine. “Try anything funny, Four Eyes, and you can roll around in a wheelchair,” she says. Charming.

At the top of the stairs, Hex is, as usual, wagging his tail and wearing a smile. I can see the delight in his eyes: new friends! I try to warn him off with my cold expression.
Don’t get attached, buddy.

My dog leads me into a small apartment, lit by another lantern in one of the corners. The window is covered with thick, dark drapes, completely blocking out the morning sun and hiding the space from prying eyes. A small bed is flush with the opposite wall, messy and unmade, piled with sheets and blankets. Evidently the Italian chef lived above his restaurant. Convenient.

“Sit down,” the girl orders.

Obediently, I crouch and then rest my butt on the worn blue carpet, feeling aches and pains from the last few days in my muscles and joints. Still, it feels good to sit. Hex plops down next to me, his tail thumping the floor. “I take my coffee with two brown sugars and a splash of skim milk,” I say. What I wouldn’t give for a coffee.

Ignoring my comment, she sits several feet away, resting the gun casually in her lap. “Let’s talk,” she says.

“Have you ever used that gun before?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

“Yes,” I say.

“A dead witch and warl during Salem’s Revenge would agree,” she says. “Both head shots.”

God. If she’s telling the truth, I’ve got nothing on her. Without Mr. Jackson’s intervention, I’d be dead.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Jane,” she says. “And yours?”

“Joe Blow,” I say. “And I suspect your last name is Doe?”

She laughs. “You’re kind of funny. Smart too. I guess it doesn’t really matter if you know my real name, does it?”

I shrug and present an offering. “My name’s Rhett Carter, so you can stop referring to me with various insults aimed at my pathetically inadequate eyesight.”

“Sorry to bend your feelings,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sorry. “You could be making that name up, too.”

“I’m not.”

“I believe you.”

“Thanks.”

“My name’s Laney Grant.”

“I believe you,” I say. “Now I can stop referring to you as Psycho Gun Girl in my head.”

“Ha ha,” she says, her tone unimpressed.

I’m about to ask about the coffee I ordered, when there’s a rustling from the bed. I glance over and a tiny hand pokes out of the sheets. “A friend of yours?” I say.

“My sister. Trish,” Laney says.

“I thought you said you haven’t talked to anyone lately?”

“She doesn’t really talk,” Laney says, fixing her eyes on the bed.

“Too young?”

“Too traumatized,” Laney says without emotion.

The hand stretches and the face of a little girl emerges from the pile of blankets, yawning. Her eyes blink open. Blue, like Laney’s. She sees me, but if she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it. She can’t be older than nine.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Laney says, as if Trish isn’t even in the room. Again, her sister doesn’t react, just looks at us.

“There’s something wrong with all of us,” I say.

Laney laughs again, and I don’t mind it. It’s not a bad laugh, not annoying like some are. Somewhat contagious. “Isn’t that the truth,” she agrees. “So what’s wrong with you?”

“I generally don’t fit in,” I say. “I’m a nerd, I read too much…”

“A true basket case,” Laney mocks.

“When I score a touchdown in football, I don’t even get excited,” I say.

“Screwed up.”

“I miss my first and last dead foster parents like they died yesterday.”

“Beyond help.”

It’s my turn to laugh. “Well, then what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Except that I’m a trigger-happy sixteen-year-old with a mute sister, two dead magic-born parents, and an unhealthy obsession with war history.”

Unconsciously, my lips part. Two dots connect and I don’t like the picture they make. “Your parents were witches?”

“A witch and a warl—yeah,” she says.

Trish is still staring at me and it’s starting to creep me out.

“And during Salem’s Revenge, you killed a witch and a warl?”

“Yeah. So?”

I don’t need to ask the next question. “Nothing. I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be. I never liked them anyway,” she says. Her lip quivers on the last word, giving away the lie.

“What did they do?” I ask.

“What did all the witches do?” she says.

Tried to kill the humans
, I think.

“So you and your sister—you’re not magic-born?” I ask. Although Mr. Jackson taught me that magical ability is a recessive gene that sometimes skips generations, it’s best to confirm.

She shakes her head and pats the side of her gun. “I doubt my parents would have tried to kill me if I was,” she says. “Not sure about Trish though. It’s kind of hard to communicate with her on account of the whole not-speaking thing.”

“How’d you…”
Kill them?
Probably not the most sensitive question, but I am curious. From experience, witches aren’t easy to kill, even after months of training and practice.

She knows exactly what I’m asking. “I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I was getting a drink of water when I heard the screams. When I went to my parents’ room, they weren’t there. I looked out into the hall and my father was at the door to my bedroom, my mother at the door to Trish’s room. They were holding fire in their hands. Not red and orange, but blue and green. Balls of colorful fire.”

“Pyros,” I say.

“You know much about them?” Laney asks.

I should, I’m a witch hunter
. Instead, I just say, “Maybe.”

She nods, as if unsurprised. I guess anyone who’s still alive knows a bit about the witch gangs. “They were going to burn us to death. Somehow I knew it the moment I saw them carrying the fire. Their pathetic non-magical children. We must’ve been a major disappointment in their lives.” The bitterness coats her words like slime.

“But you shot them before they could do anything?”

“I knew my father kept his shotgun under his bed. I guess I played too much Resident Evil growing up. Scary how real that game seems now. It was my sister and me or them. I chose us.” She motions to Trish, who’s sitting up now, her eyes wide and alert, her knotty blond hair falling past her shoulders. But she’s not staring at us anymore. Instead, she’s looking off into empty space, her arm outstretched, a single finger drawing absently in the air.

“What’s she doing?” I ask.

Laney shrugs. “She does that. Sometimes I think she’s trying to tell me something, and other times…”

“It’s just random squiggles,” I finish for her.

“Exactly.”

We both watch her for a minute, and I try to discern some pattern to the invisible curves and lines left in the wake of her finger. Am I looking at it backwards?

“Permission to sit next to your sister?” I ask.

“Leave your weapons here,” Laney says.

I unsheathe my sword and knives and rest them gently on the carpet. Hex sniffs at them as I stand and cross the room to Trish. When I ease down next to the nine-year-old, she doesn’t even recognize my presence, as if I’m not even here. Just keeps drawing.

A curving line, not quite a circle. Then a circle. A pie, a picture of the moon, a pizza? What is she drawing? A line up, then angled down, angled up again, and straight down. Is that a letter? An “M”? A straight line down. Is she spelling something out? My memory backtracks through the disappearing images. Yes! They’re definitely letters. C-O-M-I…

An N appears, then a G. “Coming,” I speak aloud.

Trish’s head snaps toward me so sharply, I can almost feel the intensity of her eyes on my skin, like sunburn. “Who’s coming?” I ask.

“It’s just gibberish,” Laney says. “Once I think she spelled ‘Tall dead no,’ and another time it was ‘Ads hall rise.’”

Trish blinks and goes back to waving her finger in the air. A line down, capped off with a line across. “T,” I say.

“Nonsense,” Laney says.

Two lines down and a line between them. “H,” I announce. “T-H.”

“Silliness,” Laney opines.

A line down and three across, from the top, middle, and bottom of the vertical line. “E. T-H-E. The. Coming the?” I say, beginning to wonder whether Laney’s right, whether the words are just random letters put together by a kid who was less than ten years old when the world fell apart.

But no, she’s still forming letters with her finger. A “Y”, an “R”, an “E”.

“Coming they’re,” I say, but then realize that I started watching when she was in the middle of her message and that she’s started again. She’s writing “Coming” one more time. “They’re coming,” I say, reversing the order, the words sounding strangely right and somewhat scary rolling off my lips. Hex runs to the covered window, nudges the drapes, and whines.

“What’s with your dog?” Laney says. I’m wondering the same thing.

“Hex?” I say. He looks back, his eyes filled with urgency, and then paws at the drapes. “I think he wants us to look outside,” I say.

“We never open the curtains,” Laney says. “It’s not safe. There are too many eyes.” Beside me, Trish continues scrawling the same message over and over again. They’re coming.
Who’s coming?
I want to scream.

“Permission to cross the room and look outside?” I ask.

“You don’t have to ask permission anymore,” Laney says. “I know you’re a witch hunter and that you could make mincemeat out of us anytime you want. But you haven’t, so I know you’re not one of the bad ones.”

“The bad ones?”

“The ones who don’t just kill witches,” Laney says, frowning at me like I’m an idiot.

Before I can even begin to consider what she means, there’s the clap of footsteps on the pavement outside.

W
e’re smack dab in the middle of a witch gang war. Hex is on one side, his tongue smeared against the glass, and Laney on the other, her shotgun between us. Even Trish makes her way over, abandoning her air writing to squeeze in next to Hex.

How did Trish know?
I wonder, glancing at the little girl with her face pressed to the window. Shining blue eyes. Sun-yellow hair. The contradiction of innocence and wisdom in her expression. When Laney whispers, “Here we go,” I look away from her sister and back down to the street.

The Brewers are lobbing grenades down the road just outside of the restaurant. Unlike normal exploding grenades, these are packed with some kind of a nasty soup that they’ve—as their gang name suggests—brewed up. Each incendiary explodes in a different fashion, wreaking havoc on the rival gang, the Conjurers, who have two wizards amongst their twenty or so witches and warlocks.

I’m careful to keep my head low, and I’m ready to duck away from the window if any of them look my way. There’s only one thing the magic-born hate more than each other: witch hunters. At least they agree on something.

“They’ve been at it for months,” Laney comments, drawing my attention.

A black grenade spirals past, thrown by an athletic-looking warlock wearing blue sneakers and sporty clothes who probably would’ve made a decent quarterback in the old world.

“Who have?” I ask.

“These two gangs,” she says. “But I’ve never seen this many of them. This might be the final battle. To the victor the spoils and all that.”

The grenade bounces along the street in the direction of the Conjurers. When it comes to rest, there’s no boom, no explosion, just a long drawn out
hisssssssss
that fills the air with a cloud of green smoke. A witch, a wizard, and a warlock are all caught in it. And then they’re not, because they get launched into the sky by an invisible force, screaming the whole way, their voices fading out of hearing distance as they get higher and higher…and then returning as they plummet to earth.

Only there are just two of them now, the witch and wizard. God only knows where the warl ended up—perhaps floating in outer space until his oxygen runs out. The wizard that’s still on the ground extends two hands and says something I can’t make out. Presumably some kind of a spell. The falling wizard stops inches from the asphalt before being spun around and placed gently on his feet.

The witch splats in a twisted mess of arms and legs and fleshy goo. I have to look away, the scene too gruesome even for me, who’s seen a whole lot of gore over the last six months.

I notice that Trish is no longer by the window, having retreated back into the room.
Good
, I think. Go back to bed. This isn’t for children’s eyes.

“You did that on purpose!” a high-pitched voice shrieks.

I glance back to the battle to find a witch with skin as dark as ebony screaming at the wizard, who’s near-on seven feet tall.
Here we go
, I think. They may be on the same side, but wizards and witches will never be friends.

“It’s like reality TV,” Laney says. “The Real Housewitches of West Virginia.”

I can’t help but snicker.

“Back off, pointy-head,” the wizard snarls. A common insult used by wizards, derived from the idiotic human notion that witches wear black pointy hats. In reality, I’ve never seen a witch wearing any kind of a hat.

“Say that again,” the witch dares, oblivious to the fight raging around her. A nearby warl points a wand, the primary instrument used by the Conjurers to cast their creation spells, down the road at the Brewers, and the ground splits open. Red- and green-skinned demons with big black eyes and webbed feet crawl from the crevice, pouring out like ants. They head straight for the Brewers, who launch a flurry of acid-filled beer bottles at them, which smash open on the cement, splattering the demons with bright yellow liquid. The underworld creatures shriek with what almost sounds like glee, but then begin melting anywhere the acid touches. However, a dozen or so manage to sneak through, leaping onto the witches and warls, biting and scratching and tearing them apart.

“Gross,” Laney says, but she shows no signs of needing to look away. I get the feeling that she’s watched many a horror movie without so much as blinking.

I, on the other hand, am about to look away again when I see her, just beyond where the wizard and witch from the Conjurer gang are fighting, spells from their wands visibly meeting in a burst of flame between them. Her hair is as white as snow this time, matching her angelic dress, which swirls like mist around her feet as she slides gracefully through the carnage, seemingly unaffected by the violence around her.

The red witch is now the white witch.

“Who’s that bitch?” Laney says.

But I ignore her, because I have the sudden urge to thrust open the window, to shout, to alert her to my presence. As if aware of my impulse, Hex nudges me with his nose and whines.
No.

I clutch at the windowsill, trying to keep my restless hands from betraying me, and watch her.

“What the hell are you doing, Witch Hunter?” Laney asks, but I continue to ignore her, held rapt by the white witch.

As she approaches the fighting witch and wizard, she plucks a hidden wand from somewhere in her dress and flicks it at them. An armor-clad knight appears, taking the brunt of their respective spells on the face of each of his dual shields. The witch and wizard are suddenly flung apart, each losing their wands and skidding across the pavement.

Smiling, almost to herself, the white witch looks up. In my peripheral vision I see Laney duck away from the window, and I know I should do the same, but my body won’t seem to listen to my brain. Our eyes lock and I hold my breath. There’s no surprise on her face, her pink lips curled, as if she knew I was here the whole time. All she has to do is alert both gangs to my presence and they’ll forget their hatred for each other to kill me.

She turns and glides away, ignoring the explosions and curses and shouts all around her, leaving me dumbfounded.

~~~

Today’s Geekologist Report

Book title: The White Witch Down the Street (Sequel to the Red Witch Next Door)

My teaser synopsis: The red witch is back, only she’s different, as white as snow, closing in on her witch hunter foe. Will he be able to resist her violent charms?

Geekyness: 6.5/10

Happy ending: Not really

Cliffhanger: Seems that way

Overall rating: 4/5

The blog post spills through my mind almost automatically. I’m still staring out the window, while Laney and Hex seem to argue behind me.

“Your friend is going to get us all killed,” she says to Hex.

Hex chuffs, which sounds more like he’s agreeing with her than sticking up for me.

“And why didn’t that witch—the big-chested white one—tell her friends we were up here?”

Hex whines. He wishes he knew.

“Does Rhett have a thing for her? Is that why he didn’t hide? Because if all it takes to win his affections is a set of big boobs and a dazzling white smile, I could slap on a miracle bra and get my teeth whitened and we could get hitched right now. How’s that sound, buddy boy? Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?”

I sigh. I’d try to explain things to her, but I don’t even understand them myself.

The witches and warlocks are dead or gone. The wizards survived, but after the little incident they went in a different direction to the rest of the Conjurers. I don’t think they’ll be allies again anytime soon.

But wait! Even as I stare out at the aftermath of the battle, a fleet of pickup trucks roll in. This time I duck, peeking only a single eye over the edge of the window frame to watch as the Necros move through the battlefield, collecting any unclaimed witch and warl bodies, like scavengers. They load the dead into a pickup truck, to be used for their magical purposes later.

They’re the same Necros that forced me to hide in this very restaurant. The corpses loaded up, they drive away, heading for the rest of town.

“Yes,” I whisper, carefully replacing the curtain and moving back into the room. I’m back on the Necros’ trail, the trail that could lead me to their headquarters, where I can finally make the Reaper pay for what they’ve done.

Laney, watching me with narrow eyes, opens her mouth to speak, but I put a finger to my lips, gesturing toward the window. “Necros,” I whisper.

“You mean the ones that collect the dead?” she says, thankfully keeping her voice low.

I nod. “You’ve seen them?”

“They come through now and again. Collect any bodies. Move on. They never really do any fighting though.”

I nod again. Makes sense.

“Who was that white witch and why didn’t you try to hide from her?” Laney asks. “And why didn’t she tell the rest of her gang that you were up here?” she adds.

“I don’t know,” I say, which is the honest answer to all three of her questions.

It’s a good thing the Necromancers showed up, as otherwise I might’ve gone crazy, my thoughts climbing and tumbling over each other like a bunch of restless children, every last question centered on one person: the red/white witch. Trying to answer the very same three questions that Laney just asked, particularly her last one, about why she didn’t rat me out. That’s not normal, for a witch to protect a human. In all likelihood, she saved my life. Which is even weirder considering she tried to kill me not that long ago.

Another important question: Which gang does she belong to? I thought she was a Volt because of the blue lightning she shot at me during our first meeting. But now I’m not so sure considering the way she used a wand to conjure a warrior to stop the wizard and witch from fighting each other. And then she walked away after seeing me, as if she really had no interest in the Conjurers and Brewers after all.

And why on God’s green witch-warring earth would I have the urge to speak to her? My only desire should’ve been to remove her head from her neck with my magged-up sword.

Weird and confusing.

I shake my head, almost expecting a ball of string and a few cobwebs to fall from my ear. I have to focus. I’ll probably never see her again. No, I
hope
I never see her again. Don’t I?

Hex barks. Crap. Will the Necros hear him, or have they moved far enough away?

I hold my breath, waiting for them to return, but they don’t. They’ve moved on, which means we need to hurry if we’re going to catch them.

Hex barks again. “Shh,” I say, turning to reprimand him, but realizing that he’s no longer beside me. Laney and I look at each other, simultaneously turning to stare back into the fevered darkness of the lantern-lit room.

Trish is at the top of the staircase, Hex beside her. She’s pointing at something, and whatever it is, Hex doesn’t like it, his low growl edging toward an angry snarl.

Laney grabs her shotgun as I lift my sword, and together we rush over to the entrance. Something pale flashes in the inky gloom below us. The click of bone-hard feet tap against wooden floorboards. Soulless, empty eye sockets peer up at us.