The Warlock's Curse (4 page)

Anson opened the box. It was lined with
uchawi
wood, polished glove-smooth. He ran his fingertips along the inside, and they came away coated with a dark, powdery residue that tingled. He rubbed his fingers together. The box was open, but Sarah’s soul was locked within it, within a world of suffering, and there was nothing he could do to save her.

Anson clicked the box shut. He tucked it back inside his coat and stood. He turned away from Cowdray. James didn’t notice his father’s rise; he was warming himself before the fire. In the light of the now-risen full moon, and the flickering gleam of the flames, his young face looked very old and very sad.

In that moment, Anson felt very keenly the pain of failing everyone he had ever loved.

Then, there was a cry—high-pitched, desperate—and a dark blur, a flash of red and bright silver, and Anson felt something slam against him from behind.

It was a Body a young lithe body. Cowdray’s whore. He smelled her reeking carnal stench, the salt of her tears. Her body was warm against his. He felt something else then. Sharp pain. He saw his son turn at the sound of the harlot’s cry, watched as astonishment and horror spread across James’ young face.

She had stabbed him, Anson realized, as his knees buckled.

And he saw her hand, covered with his own blood, coming up to do it again. With the strength of reflex, he seized her wrist, pain screaming through his side as he wrenched the silver knife from her grasp. She squeaked like a stepped-on kitten as he jerked her arm up behind her, laid the knife against her throat.

James was at his father’s side immediately, Bradstreet’s men at his heels. But Anson forestalled them all with a small shake of his head. Instead, he jerked the whore around to where Cowdray was taking his last breaths on God’s earth.

“You’ve taken everything from me.” His side throbbed with pain. Hot blood trickled down his leg. “Here is one thing ... one miserable, wretched thing that I can take from you.”

“I care not ...” Cowdray’s voice was barely audible. But even through his agony, through the pallor of swiftly approaching death, Anson saw tenderness in the warlock’s eyes. He pressed the knife harder against her throat, drawing blood. The girl’s hand came up to clutch his; their blood mingled, sticky as raw honey.

Anson was certain that he would slit her throat. He wanted very much to slit her throat. He wanted to cause this demon pain, do the work that even God had scrupled to do.

But then, in the soft moonlight, he saw his son’s face.

It was held, as it always was, carefully and blankly. But something—something divine or demonic—allowed Anson to see, for the first time, the horror hiding behind the boy’s eyes. His son had always wished to please him, and he had concealed his disgust well. But it was there, just as strong as he himself had ever felt it. Killing the witch would do no good. It would not rectify the unfairness God had ordained for the world. It would not please Him. Nothing would.

He shoved the girl away. She stumbled forward, falling to her knees at Cowdray’s side. She seized the warlock’s bloody hand, held it tight.

And then Anson realized what a horrible mistake he had made.

Cowdray could lift his hand just barely, just enough to touch the blood at the girl’s throat. His swollen purple fingers encircled her neck. He did not have the strength to hold her, but she did not resist—instead, she leaned into his grasp. There was magic dancing around Cowdray’s fingers, magic drawn from the blood of the girl, and from Anson’s own blood, mixed with hers. As the warlock began to speak, Anson felt magic beginning to burn within him—blood calling to blood. His body felt hot, as if he had coals in the pit of his stomach.

There was an unearthly scream from the warlock. But the sound was coming from between the girl’s lips, and then it became words. Chanting, high-pitched and wild, in a bitter old language. Power, brighter than the full moon, brighter than the sun at summer’s zenith, wreathed the pair of them.

Anson fell to his knees, agony burning through his veins.

“More stones!” he screamed to Bradstreet’s men. “All of them! Now! For the love of Christ!”

But Cowdray’s voice continued to stream from the whore’s lips, even as one, two, three more stones were heaped upon him.

“I curse you, Anson Kendall,” the girl mouthed, her eyes wholly black. “I curse your children, and your children’s children, and your children’s children’s children. Every full moon, from this time until the end of days on earth, I will take the body of one of your descendents and I will use it to do all the evil—all and more—that you think you have thwarted. I will be the everlasting curse of your lineage. I curse you. I curse you!”

Cowdray voiced the final word in high church Latin—
maledictus
—and Anson felt the force of it like a bolt from a crossbow. It slammed into him. He shrieked.

And then he realized that James was screaming too, clawing at his own flesh.

James. His child. His
son
.

Anson staggered to his feet, ignoring the agony that was melting his bones, ignoring the force of magic that was lashing him with molten fury. Bradstreet’s men were cowering in terror; from one of them, Anson seized a short sword.

“I curse you,” Cowdray rasped in his own voice as Anson seized him by his blood-soaked hair.

It took several strokes to hack off the warlock’s head. But as the last ragged sinew was severed, the maelstrom of magic calmed. Blood gouted from the warlock’s ruined neck; the girl who had been his voice, who had channeled his magic through her own Body collapsed—dead.

The sudden stillness seemed even louder than the deafening thunder that had preceded it. Anson looked to where James lay on the ground—the boy was unconscious, but he was breathing. His son was alive.

Anson Kendall lifted the severed head in his trembling hand, intending to cast it away into the darkest well of shadow he could find. Only then did he see that the warlock’s eyes were still open, glittering with moonlight and malice. And his lips were curved into a satisfied, mocking smile.

Maledictus
, the dead warlock whispered.

Part I: Waxing

Chapter One

A Battle of Wills

S
ACRAMENTO
V
ALLEY
, C
ALIFORNIA
29
DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

W
ill Edwards lay on his belly in a stand of dry grass, peering through field glasses at the old farmhouse nestled in the bowl-shaped valley. His bicycle rested where he’d dropped it, the click of its still-spinning rear wheel drowned by the susurration of cicadas. The day had been Indian-summer hot, but the sky was deepening purple and the chilled-ink shadows of late November were beginning to pool in the valley’s hollows. Soon it would be time to fire up the electric generator, to power the lights that would make the farmhouse seem the only warm place for miles beneath a cold, waning moon.

Tonight, though, the lights would stay dark. Because Will was the only one in the family who knew how to coax the stinking old kerosene power-plant into operation. And he’d be damned if he lifted a finger to help any of them ever again.

In fact, there was only one reason Will had staked out this observation spot at the top of the hill. It was Thanksgiving, and it was rumored that Ben might be coming home.

Will had never really seen his brother Ben ... not that he could remember, anyway. Ben had left home before Will could even walk on two legs, and he’d never come home since, not even once. All Will knew of his brother was based on incomplete snippets of information overheard from his parents or bartered for from his older brothers. Ben had had a fight with Father. It had been a fight so bitter that he’d been sent away, far away, across the country to New York City. There he’d built a whole separate life for himself. He had studied at the famous Stanton Institute as a student. After graduation, the Institute had retained him as an employee.

These unornamented facts did not suggest much common ground between Will and his older brother—save for one still-smoldering patch. They both thought that their father was an insufferable bastard.

For Will had had his own fight with Father, on his eighteenth birthday, and it too was bitter enough to make him leave home (well, for three days at least—and not to New York, but rather to his buddy Pask de la Guerra’s neighboring spread a few miles over).

On the surface, it was a fight about birthday presents. Which, when considered in such a way, sounded awful petty even to Will’s mind. But of course it was about so much more.

He’d had no cause to complain about
quantity
, for Father had given him no fewer than three presents. It was the
quality
of these gifts that he objected to, for each one had turned out to be worse than the last. The first was mingy, the second superfluous, and the third ... well, the third one was downright
intolerable
.

The mingy present was a silver dollar, almost fifty years old, a sentimental piece Father had kept on his watch chain for years. It was a nice piece of money—if one wanted to buy a steak dinner. But it was not enough for anything else. Certainly not enough for a train ticket to Detroit. Not enough to get free of this place. And Father knew it. It was nothing more than a pointed—and cruel—reminder of Will’s powerlessness. It was as if Father had presented him with a ball and chain and expected him to be pleased that the shackle was lined with velvet.

Next came the superfluous present. Advice. What eighteen-year-old boy needed more of that? And not only advice, but advice that came wrapped in a Latin test to boot. Laying a hand on Will’s shoulder, the old man had asked, “Will, can you tell me the meaning of the phrase
Veritas vos Liberabit?
”

“The truth shall make one free.” Will offered the translation with slight hesitancy, trying to remember if
vos
was singular or plural, certain Father was trying to trip him up with the pronoun.

But Father didn’t seem to care about the pronoun, he had just nodded gravely, then released a heavy sigh. “It’s a very simple motto and it sounds very good. But I’m afraid it does not accurately capture the actual cost of truth or freedom.”

What the hell did
that
mean? It sounded like Father was rehearsing another political speech for Argus—probably trying to figure out how he could work in something about the blood of martyrs. Will must have made a noise of exasperation, because Father had dropped his hand, and Will was left hoping beyond hope that he was saving the best for last. Maybe he’d changed his mind about the letter Will had received from Tesla Industries.

But as it turned out, the last present had been the worst—the absolute
worst
—and Will still got so mad when he thought about it that he didn’t think about it. And so he had run away to the de la Guerras’ and lost himself in work on Pask’s auto.

Mechanical tinkering always set Will’s spirits at ease, and Pask’s 1906 Baker Electric was always in need of some kind of repair. Pask—the grandson of Don Diego de la Guerra, an eminent
Californio
—had been wildly enthusiastic about the machine when he’d gotten it three years ago, but had since grown as tired of it as any toy. The more Pask neglected the Baker, the more it acted up—and the more it acted up, the worse Pask treated it, driving it with the unconscious negligence he might use toward one of his father’s field hands.

The culmination of Pask’s mistreatment of the Baker was slapping red and green paint on it for Homecoming, then—after he and Will had one too many nips of whiskey at the game—driving it into an irrigation ditch. Pask had vowed he would leave the half-submerged heap there to rot, but Will had convinced him to have a team haul it back to the de la Guerra’s barn, where Will had spent the better part of a month disassembling and cleaning the electrical motor.

Will lowered the field glasses, catching a glimpse of his own hands as he did. He’d scrubbed them with pumice soap, but they were still seamed with grease from his most recent work on the Baker. At least the time he’d spent hiding out at the de la Guerras’ had been well spent. It had given him the opportunity to execute the
coupe de grace
of his rebuild—retrofitting the jalopy with a nifty little power system of his own design.