Charlotte remained outside in the storm, watching over the squirming creature that had once been Norman Dunne. But Keomany had needed Professor Varick with her.
“How do you do what you do?” Miles asked.
Keomany glanced at him quizzically. “Magic? You study. You practice. You meditate and you search within yourself for connections to the things outside yourself.”
“But elemental magic,” Miles said. “The kind of power you can tap into is unimaginable.”
Keomany smiled. “Not for me, Professor Varick. It’s just earthcraft. It’s speaking to the goddess.”
She saw the alarm in his eyes and shook her head. “Not Navalica. Gaea. The one who has given us our cradle and our grave.”
Keomany rubbed her palms on the kitchen table, feeling through the paint, sensing the wood from which the table had been made, the trees from which the lumber had been cut.
“Besides,” she said, “if you think I have power, you know nothing of real magic. What I can do is nothing compared to Octavian’s sorcery. If magic is language, I speak only one, and he speaks every language ever conceived.”
As she spoke, fingers of wood thrust up from the kitchen table and began to creep along the edges of the iron chest. They were not painted, but freshly grown oak branches complete with bark. Outside, with the storm all around and the only roots the thinnest sprigs deep under the pavement, it had taken every ounce of her concentration for her to manipulate the anarchic nature of this chaos-tainted place. Gaea’s presence beyond the sphere of Navalica’s influence was barely a whisper to her now, but that whisper remained inside Keomany’s heart and allowed her to fight the poison of this place.
Or so she told herself.
Yet when she drew the wind around her, pushing against the storm and shielding herself against the hot rain, the power that suffused her did not feel pure. And when she had reached down into the ground and dragged those roots up through the pavement, making them grow and twist and grab hold of Norman Dunne, lashing him to the street, she knew that her earth magic had not tapped into Gaea’s power, but into the unnatural stream of the chaos itself.
Fight the poison?
She was fooling herself. The taint had wormed its way inside her and now ate at her heart and her magical essence like a cancer.
But this . . . the pure hard wood of Bill Hodgson’s kitchen table, untouched by the storm or the rain . . . it still held most of its natural properties. Touching it, working it, helped to focus her and to allow her to feel the distant presence of Gaea, yearning toward her just as she was yearning toward the goddess.
Her
goddess. Nature herself.
“Amazing,” Miles said.
The finger-branches wound about the iron chest to hold it in place as others lifted the latches that Norm Dunne had shattered. When the branches pushed the lid up, the chest opened with surprising ease, almost as if it had wanted to yield its secrets to them.
Keomany thought of Norm Dunne’s heart attack and madness, his transformation from ordinary fisherman to chaos-puppet, and she did not relish peering into the chest. But when seconds passed without anything stirring inside that iron box, she glanced at Miles and they both shrugged.
“I will if you will,” he said.
Keomany felt a stirring inside her, born of chaos. She grinned. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
Miles took a single, salacious glance at her breasts and then the two of them bent forward to peer into the iron box. Keomany felt a strange relief at the ordinariness of the contents, at least by the standards of centuries-old secrets. There were three parchment scrolls, one quite a bit older and yellower than the others, itself on a spindle of carved mahogany. With the scrolls were five glass ampoules containing various liquids. One was clear, but the others varied in hue and viscosity. Coppery grit floated in one. Another surely contained thick blood of deepest red. Within the fourth, a yellowish tincture, floated a scarab beetle. In the fifth and last, a milky, pearlescent substance that flowed like mercury when she reached inside and tipped the ampoule back and forth.
One by one, Keomany and Miles removed the contents of the chest. There were small stone jars that, when uncorked, proved to have semiliquid dyes and inks inside them, as well as a pair of sharp, filed bones that looked like crude knives and a pair of slender pieces of iron, sharply pointed on one end.
A crinkling of paper made Keomany look up. Miles had unfurled one of the scrolls—not the oldest, which he seemed hesitant to touch for fear of ruining it—and studied it with narrowed eyes.
“Can you read it?” she asked. “What does it say?”
Miles continued to study the scroll, his lips moving slightly as he tried to work out its message.
“It’s in more than one language,” he said. “The one I can sort of decipher is an archaic Latin dialect.”
Keomany studied the materials arranged on the kitchen table.
“And?” she demanded, looking up at him. “What does it tell us?”
Miles exhaled. If he had looked terrified before, now he looked even more so, and nauseated as well.
“It tells us that we’re screwed,” he said, a hysterical edge in his voice. He turned the scroll around so that she could see the drawing of the nude blue goddess with her many breasts and her blood-dripping talons, standing on a pile of corpses amid a swirl of trees and mountains that all seemed to be swirling into a gaping hole below her.
“Chaos storm,” Keomany whispered.
“I don’t think Hawthorne’s going to be in our world much longer,” Miles replied. He bit his lip and exhaled, making a visible attempt to control his fear and sorrow. “She was a prisoner. All this time, Navalica was a prisoner. This chest must have been dumped hundreds of miles out to sea—”
“But how did it get here?” Keomany asked. “How did she get here?”
Miles shook his head. “You don’t understand. She was already here. She’s been here since this town was founded, and a prisoner elsewhere before that. They trapped her inside an illusion of humanity, of ordinary life, with a touch of dementia. And I think Amber’s family has something to do with it.”
“So, why now? How did she escape?”
Miles shrugged. “Maybe with other supernatural powers—gods and demons—slipping back into this world . . . she must have sensed them, somehow. Even unaware of it, she dragged the chest toward her, until poor Norm Dunne hauled it up from below and opened it.
“This,” Miles said, gesturing toward the window, which rattled under the storm’s assault. “All of this . . . it’s just her waking up.”
With a crash, the front door slammed open. Keomany jumped from her chair, knocking it to the floor, and gestured for Miles to return the objects to the chest. As he did, she rushed to the kitchen doorway, only to nearly collide with Charlotte.
“What are you doing?” Keomany asked. “Did Dunne get away?”
Charlotte glanced over her shoulder in fear. “Something happened. An explosion or something. All that blue lightning is spreading everywhere, and it’s coming—”
The house shook, glass shattered, and sizzling blue light washed in through the door, streaming through the windows. The chaos wave blew Charlotte off her feet and she crashed into Keomany, who let out a scream as she and the vampire girl rolled across the kitchen floor in a tangle of limbs.
Keomany’s heart raced. Emotions and desires roiled in her. Charlotte’s breasts were pressed against her, perfect bow lips only inches away. The urge to touch her, to taste her, was almost as powerful as her desire to rend flesh and break bone, to revel in violence. She groaned, and it became a rhythm in her throat, a melody in her mind. She wanted to dance and scream.
The touch of her goddess saved her.
Blue light still shimmering outside the house, the glow spreading through the rooms, she looked within herself for the peace that Gaea had always brought her, and she found it there. Her tether to nature—the true nature of this world—was tenuous, but it remained, and it was enough for her to breathe.
Charlotte did not move for several seconds. She lay on top of Keomany without so much as the rise and fall of her chest to indicate that she lived, but then Keomany remembered that the vampire did not need to breathe.
“Hey, get up,” she said.
Charlotte’s eyes snapped open. Tiny pinpricks of red against black. Slowly, her lips peeled back from her fangs and she hissed. Her head cocked back, and Keomany had a vision of the beautiful, horrible girl tearing out her throat.
With a gesture, the wind twisted around her, tore Charlotte from on top of her, and hurled the vampire girl across the room. Charlotte smashed into the cabinets above the kitchen counter. Doors fell open as she tumbled to the ground, the cabinet partially giving way, and piles of dishes and bowls slid out, shattering all over the floor.
She was up in an instant.
Between them, Miles Varick staggered to his feet. Blood trickled from a cut on his forehead that Keomany assumed he’d gotten when the blast of magic had knocked them off their feet. He wiped his palm over it, then stared at his bloody hand and started to laugh.
For an instant, all of the air seemed to be sucked from the room, and then a second wave struck, a blast of light that swept through the kitchen. This time they did not fall. Perhaps they were ready for it, Keomany thought, or perhaps they had already been infused with enough of the chaos in that magic that it passed through them more easily.
Charlotte leaped the distance between herself and Miles, grabbed the professor by the face, and slammed him down on top of the kitchen table.
“Stop laughing!” the vampire screamed, her lower jaw distending, fangs elongating into gleaming needle points. “It’s not fucking funny!”
“Charlotte, no!” Keomany shouted.
She reached within and sought the voice of Gaea, the tether to her goddess. Wind gusted around her and she hurled it, conducting it at the two of them, grinding their hips together on top of the white table . . . and where was the iron chest? Damn it, where had it fallen in all of this?
But the vampire held on tightly, and only then did Keomany see the horrible truth—the savagery she herself had contributed to. Charlotte had slammed Miles down on top of those jutting wooden fingers she had summoned up from the table, the fresh oak branches that had held the damned box until only moments ago.
“Let him go!” Keomany cried.
With a snarl, her tongue snaking out, Charlotte turned toward her. Tears of bloody anguish ran down her cheeks.
“I can’t!” the vampire cried, her voice a ragged scream of conflict between bloodlust and humanity. “I need it! Don’t you get it? I’m just too goddamn hungry!”
Grinding herself against Miles—dying, bleeding Miles, with the branches jutting up through his chest, making bloodstained tents under his shirt—Charlotte lunged forward and sank those impossibly long needles into his throat. Her fangs changed, shrinking, and soon her lips were attached leechlike to his flesh, as she drank him.
Keomany screamed once more, reached out with the magic inside of her, and took control of the wooden table again. With a twist of her wrists, she jerked her arms back, and the oak fingers jutting from the table shot upward, becoming spikes, impaling Charlotte, who writhed atop them and shrieked in fury.
Too late.
Miles Varick twitched as his blood spilled out onto the table, dripping off the edges and through the seam where the table leaf would have gone. His head lolled to one side and he looked at Keomany, all traces of the salacious influence of chaos vanished from his eyes.
“Don’t let me . . .” he said, throat bubbling with blood. “What happens if I . . . if I die here? Where do I go?”
Keomany stared at him, a new fear, unlike any she had ever felt, blossoming inside her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 16
MILES
lay dying. Keomany could feel the chaos around them. It wasn’t just in the hot rain, but in every intake of breath. The air held chaos magic, and Hawthorne itself had been tainted. It remained part of her world, but its fundamental nature had been altered, and she knew Navalica’s influence must be spreading, no longer confined only to this one town. How far would her twisted magic reach? In time, would it envelop the world?
She shook her head. Such concerns were for later. The light had begun to dim in Miles Varick’s eyes and the thought of letting his spirit leave his body in such an uncertain place, not knowing if his soul would be able to escape Navalica’s dark magic, made her sick. If she let him die like this, in this place, she might be consigning him to a new kind of Hell. Keomany barely knew Miles, but he had seemed an honorable man, and she could not allow this to happen.
Charlotte moaned, but the sound turned into a low growl. Even in pain and twisted by hunger, the girl was beautiful, but it was a terrible beauty. She looked at Keomany with those black eyes, red irises expanding, and her upper lip curled back in hatred.
“Bitch,” Charlotte snarled.