Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (45 page)

I nodded, letting my eyelids fall shut; they were suddenly quite heavy. “I knew you'd have answers. What can we do?”

“First thing is your safety, honey,” she said seriously. “We must put you immediately into psi-stasis so no one can find you, and then you must go, both you and Lord Dreppenstedt, into witness protection.”

Now that I had official, expert confirmation of my suspicions, slipping out of town in the dead of night sounded right. I had to send Wes home to Mom and Dad in Canada, at least until we could figure out how to battle a homicidal goetic witch. Then Harry and I would go to his flat in London, or his home in the south of France.

“Psi-stasis,” I said softly. “And escape. That's the first step, you're right. It's going to take more than just a cold saltwater bath for this. She's been in my home. Before I go, I have to get her out. I have to break her witch-walking spell so she isn't standing over my shoulder while I'm booking my flight and making arrangements.”

“Send it in a circle,” Ruby advised calmly. “You're going to need the eyes-of-light spell.”

“I'm not familiar with it.”

“I am, dear, I am.” She made a thoughtful noise. “It requires both wildcrafted goldthread and Mediterranean silphion.”

My hopes sank. “Goldthread was harvested to extinction in the 1800s,” I groaned. I'd never even heard of the other herb. “Isn't there a more modern version of this spell?”

Ruby smiled gloriously, shaking her head. “You've forgotten where you are, dear?”

I exhaled hard, relieved. “You have some? How could I possibly…?”

“Marlene, don't be silly,” she said, reminding me once again of Grandma Vi's warm, unruffled manner. “You're a rising star, a lovely talented slip of a girl. I couldn't let anything bad happen to you if I could help in any way.” Her softly-curled claw of a hand touched my glove, patted it reassuringly. “I have some, but it's in a special humidor in the cellar, and I don't go down the stairs anymore. My Gregori won't be available to help me until dusk, of course. We should start as soon as possible, though.”

My brain jotted. Is his casket down there in the same room as the humidor? Other than Wesley, who didn't count, I'd actually never met another sane and sociable revenant. My only other revenant sighting was vile Jeremiah Prost. I wondered if Gregori was anything like my Harry.

“I'll fetch it,” I offered. “If you trust me near Mr. Nazaire's casket, which you totally can.” I couldn't imagine what other treasures she might have stashed away down there, guarded by her ancient companion. Extinct herbs! Maybe she had false unicorn root. My fingers itched inside my gloves; as one form of magic sensed a sympathetic power source, the Blue Sense trembled to life, aching to be released like a cock in a strip joint. I hopped to my feet and went to the door behind the cash desk where she pointed.

“Of course I trust you, dear. I know you're not going to touch him,” she assured me. “You get the herbs, I'll look up the spell we need. The humidor is set high in the wall, but there's a step stool there, or there was, last I checked. It's been more than a year since I could manage the stairs.” She laughed softly, and behind her thick lenses the laughter in her eyes was jolly and full of something else… “Getting old is hell.”

“Just tell me where the light switch is.” My hand slipped along the wall while I tried to see past the third step down. The blackness was a solid barrier.

Ruby's chai tea breath was suddenly blowing around my shoulder. She leaned one frail hand against the doorjamb. “Let's get you safely out of the way.”

Wait, wha--

Two deceptively strong hands thrust into my lower back. Jerked off balance I plummeted forward, flung headlong down the stairs into the dark.

FORTY-TWO

I tucked around my head as I plunged down the stairs, bracing for impact. The force of elbows hitting the treads jarred my teeth. My knee hit an edge and there was a sickening crunch. I cried out, one yelp, and whapped into the cement floor, my wind knocked out in a silencing huff.

I whirled to a stop as my side hit the corner where the wall took a sudden turn. The not-quite-healed wounds in my belly wailed to attention, their tenderness soaring. Gasping to draw air into lungs that no longer seemed to work, I forced my eyes open to seek out the source of danger. A click, then dull light from dusty bulbs.

Ruby jogged agilely down the stairs. Jogged, dear God. Her glasses (a prop, I saw now) bounced on their cord against her bosom. She snatched my elbow without consideration to injury, claw-like clutch dug into my flesh, finding the joint. Dragging me with no trouble across the coarse floor, her hand an inescapable clamp, hard enough to pull ragged sound from my throat. Old chipped paint grabbed the fabric of my jeans. My exposed arm raked along cement. My knee throbbed, already swelling. I wriggled to free myself from her pincer-grip. No arthritis there, no sir.

Weakness hit me with a sinking swell, dragging me down even as I fought it.

“Finally,” Ruby commented, dropping my arm and planting both hands on her hips, frowning. She consulted her watch. “Eighteen minutes. You drink too much caffeine; your body is accustomed to it.”

“Eighteen…?” I widened my eyes as wide as they could go, but still my vision was slippery and my eyes didn't obey my directions.

I was vaguely aware we were not alone; two blobs of indeterminate construct stood sentinel-like against the wall, faceless
golems, vague muddy shapes with their arms above them in silent appeal to the sky. In the center of the room, the candles she lit spent unnaturally-violet light that bounced off an obsidian mirror. In the circle a woman sat tied to a chair, her long-haired head slumped over chin to chest, a spill of strawberry blonde covering some of her nudity but not enough.

“Dan…” I slurred with realization. Danika Sherlock. I could think it but my mouth wouldn't make the words, my tongue skimmed the words. I tried to bring my eyes up to Ruby's but they only made it as far as the toes of her Wellies. “You… why… I don't think so good.”

“Never take tea from a stranger, dear,” she advised, a tad late.

Fuckanut. “Drug…”

“I drugged you, yes dear, clearly not enough. You're still running that cunting mouth of yours.”

I summoned my strength to spit, “Suck my left—” and promptly got a mouth full of rubber.

Ruby didn't kick like an old lady. My lips crushed against my teeth and pain shot up through my face. I tasted blood instantly.

She pulled me to standing, an amazing feat considering my knees didn't work and I wasn't especially eager to help her. Supporting my whole weight, she moved without effort toward the odd purple light. That was bad, my woozy brain reported. No good can come of purple light, unless you're at a rock concert. I tried to resist and found my sagging limbs useless. Forced into a pile on the floor next to an ominous iron ring, I slid onto my belly as she started humming. Ruby produced lengths of thick rope from a nearby dust-covered bushel barrel, knocking loose several mismatched leather gloves that looked vaguely familiar: pink, tan with fur on the cuff, blood red. Blurrily I stared at them, trying to make a connection through a melty haze. Mine.

My head fell to one side and my eyes rolled down to crawl over the floor with growing panic. On the cement beneath me, black chalk was barely visible against the dark grey paint. Intricate stars, different than Wiccan pentagrams, curved inward as though stricken with disease, anorexic. Starving, emaciated symbols, each star covered with tiny writing in a foreign tongue and curling sigils, like the ones I'd seen desecrating my office.

If I could keep my head from swimming, I was sure I could figure something out. OK, so I got tricked and beat up by a little old lady. Who hasn't? That's no reason to cry. But I was crying. As she tightened rope around my ankle, my shoulders shook and my nose leaked. She jerked my arms behind me and bound them together and I could do nothing to stop her.

Ruby pulled a big wooden stand with a triangular shelf into the center of the circle, where her obsidian mirror tilted to catch the flickering light of two candles, their deviant color a cross between French lilac and February crocus. They made me think of my brother's new eyes, his revenant eyes, and my thoughts bounced to Harry (I should have brought Hood after all, Harry). And then to their babysitter, that hottie with the stakes (I should know that guy's name, cuz I think I fucked him a couple times) and finally to Danika. Her right hand was missing the middle finger, the stump red and smooth, cauterized and covered in what might have been melted wax. It must have hurt. How I wished I could enjoy that sight, but I found myself feeling sorry for her.

A heavy, sulfurous odor belched from the wicks of Ruby's candles, and the light that curled out around them turned sickly luminous grape-jelly neon. There was something terribly wrong with it, but my grey cells were too sluggish to put it together until she began her incantation, her voice low and sonorous.

“Come, ethereal incarnate. Come, enigma solved, He who must answer all. Come presently in form daemonic, specific to thy summoning.”

The light flared under her command, and Danika stirred, her filthy mud-streaked hair swaying like a strawberry-blonde curtain.

“Come, demon, known as Beroth of Sanchoniaton, Berith of the Sichemites. Come, face the tetragramaton, Great and Terrible Duke Bolfri of the Grave, thy desires to be fed. Come, Seer of the Past, Present and Future. I command thy otherworldly presence.”

When Danika let out a billowing, choking cough of desperate refusal, the hairs on my arms stood straight up. Her head whipped from side to side, gagging, trying to deny entrance. Ruby's voice climbed, deep and filling the room.

“Speak without guile, demon, in my mother tongue, of things infernal, and do tremble here before this circle, here visibly, here affably in the manifest that I desire!”

An invisible finger of warmth slithered along my jaw line then, the heat intensifying until it was hot enough to leave a singe-mark on my skin. Queasy with dread, I used my shoulder against the floor to worm backwards, my rubber legs ignoring commands. Blood-tinged fluid appeared near my chest in a round shape that had no obvious source. Another pool of it formed nearby out of nothing, puddled around unseen footsteps, phantom cloven hooves. I braced myself for whatever might be about to pounce from the shadow between this world and the nether, or the depths of the Eversea, as a low vibration began under the floor, shuddering the very cement.

Danika's spine jerked rigidly, the legs of the chair teetering back then falling to right with a clunk. She wriggled upright like a serpent worked her spine, except her head which hung low.

“I will be fed,” Danika's mouth rasped within the waterfall of her hair. It was not her voice. It was not anyone's voice. It was the scratch of evil in the room. Something between a canine's injured howl and the low reverberation of an angry cat, a disembodied voice from the hollow of her throat that raised my hackles in a quilling rush.

“In time,” Ruby promised lightly. She turned to face me. I was sure I'd see an unbalanced and disheveled face now, but Ruby was still calm, cool and definitely collected. Somehow that was worse, much worse. She informed me, “Today is your lucky day, Marlene.”

I've been called many things. I wasn't going to stand for Marlene. “Name…Marnie…you stupid bitch,” I managed.

Ruby's foot flew again and I saw it coming but what could I do? Tied to the iron ring at her mercy, I took it square in the face. Pain ribboned across my cheekbones in both directions from my nose and I tasted blood anew.

I snorted outward, trying to clear the blood from my nostrils. “What did we…ever do?”

“Prancing around in the limelight, for one, like fucking whores. Camera whores. Fame whores. Power whores. But you're a flash in the pan, aren't you? You've proven you can't do anything right.”

I hocked from deep in my throat and spat blood-tinged phlegm at her.

She looked at it, on the hem of her skirt. “You'll never amount to anything.”

“If you believed that…” I said with effort, “you'd let us fail.” I wrinkled my face to see if my nose was broken and the pain was so intense I thought I might vomit.

“You waste precious resources and you're too much of a risk. If I can profit from taking those resources and dealing with the risk, why shouldn't I? Everyone wins.”

My drug-addled brain stored that away for later, since it made no sense in my present state.

“You drove Danika mad… tried to get her to kill me.” I had a light bulb moment. Danika's ‘That is the promise’ comment. “You promised… if she brought Harry, you'd help her Bond to him. She'd get a new companion to fill…hole in her psyche.”

Ruby shrugged. “All I had to do was tell her that you and your little boy-toy Mark Batten killed George Cuthbert, and show her how she could have vengeance. She was practically frothing at the mouth to have her vengeance.”

“I had nothing to do with–” I cried, but then it struck me so hard my throat clammed tight. Batten knew Ruby, said he had worked with her. In the past, he'd been a vampire hunter, a well-paid, freelance hunter. “You paid Mark Batten and his crew to kill George Cuthbert.”

Ruby hissed a laugh; it sounded like a disturbed nest of snakes.

“I will untie you, demon,” Ruby said, touching the back of Danika's bent head. Danika's chin rose, though her eyes remained shut. “And Danielle will have her vengeance in the circle. Does she hear me, demon?”

“She hears her mother-mistress,” the demon confirmed with Danika's mouth, with his own garbled voice.

Ruby grinned, her eyes flashing. “You will tear Marnie Baranuik limb from limb, Danielle. Now, while you live, or after your death, you shall not rest until your deed is done.”

Tear? Limbs? My head cleared in a sobering rush, panic driving adrenalin past the drugs and into my veins for fight-or-flight.

“Her name's not Danielle,” I shouted, and Danika blinked her eyes open, surprised, confused. “Her name is Danika Sherlock and she's the gorgeous, famous TV star who replaced your sagging ass!”

“It's no use, fool, her mind has long been my play thing,” Ruby laughed at me.