On the other side of the walls, Bruiser said something and Rick laughed. The two of them being jovial together. It was creepy. Worse, the flashlight showed me that there was no way out except through the walls, which were surely spelled. No door or latch or catch, no window, hidden panel, or bookcase to search for the book that would release the wall. Zip. Nada.
I took a step to pound on the wall and my boot hit something solid. I aimed the flash down. It illuminated a handle in the floor. A trapdoor.
“The one you seek,” Kathyayini had said, “she is bound to the Earth. She didn’t mean to be bound, but she cannot get away now.” The three pocket watches had been transported with me, and were aligned in a semicircle around the handle, all open, all set for twelve noon. Or midnight.
I opened my mouth to call out to the guys, and snapped it closed with a clack of teeth. If I called to the men on the other side of the walls and they broke them down, would that dislodge whatever magics had brought me here? I’d hate to go boom when I’d finally found something that might be useful. I tucked the fatter disc into my pocket, zipped it closed, and gathered up the pocket watches. The minute this thing was over, I was busting the watches and dropping the discs into a bucket of sulfuric acid.
I reached down, grabbing the handle in the trapdoor. And pulled.
CHAPTER 24
That Was Before I Killed Her Sister
It opened silently, not with the hair-raising creak I expected. Nothing jumped out at me. Nothing moved. Nothing made a single sound.
The smell from the crawl space was the fetid stench of a mass grave. I aimed the flash down to see bare, sandy ground and what might have been ankle bones with two leg bones sticking out of it. The angle wasn’t good enough to see anything more, but I was just happy not to see hundreds of rats squealing away. Dead bodies, I was getting used to.
Seven small steps led down, like a ladder, open and rickety. I got a firm grip on the weapon and the flash and paced carefully down them. I stepped onto the ground, finding it firm and dry and sandy. The floor above me was not insulated, just bare boards, and I could hear people up there walking around, muffled voices through the wood and sheets of old linoleum.
I flashed the light around the crawl space. I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. Then I realized it was a head. Human. Witch. Sticking out of the sandy earth. It was also alive. The head was female, upright, and I could see a slow pulse in the neck, maybe forty beats a minute.
I scanned my light to the right and saw another head, this one less buried, with a neck and shoulders and one arm free from the ground. Female. She was wearing clothes over her thin skeleton, skin and bones showing at wrist and collar, and her hair was matted into a slimy mess. She had a chain around her neck and an amulet hung from it, open, set to three o’clock even. A little farther to the right was another woman. Only her face was visible, the rest of her buried, her head tilted back, her mouth open like a drowning victim gasping for a last breath. Witches, all. All glowing with witchy power in swirling, oily, foul shades of energy, like the death energies of everything that had ever been alive.
I moved the light again. And again. The seventh woman was Misha. She was sitting up, her legs partially buried in the sandy soil, her hands free. She still wore traces of lipstick, mascara smeared below her eyes in the bruised hollows. She had put up a fight. She had a black eye and a puffy lip. That was not like the passive Misha I had known as a child. “Good for you,” I whispered.
The light caught the gleam of metal. A cell phone rested on her lap. The amulet on her chest was open, the clock set at ten even. I wanted to rush to her, but I had no idea what to do for her and no idea if I would kill her if I tried to pull her from the dirt. I moved the flash around the rest of the circle. All of the women were buried to some extent or another. None of them were the Acheé women.
The floor was low and I bent, studying the witches. All of them were alive except the ones at my feet. I shone the light down and saw a skull with some connective tissue left, some hair, her teeth showing the black of old fillings and metal dental work.
Beside her was another skull, less preserved. They appeared to be laid out in the beginnings of some pattern I didn’t yet understand.
I moved the light around the witch circle and realized that the witches and dirt they were buried in looked . . . wrong. As I watched, something moved over Misha’s knee. And I realized that the women hadn’t been deliberately buried. The earth of the circle was instead swallowing them. I picked out the women who had been buried the least amount of time. And I studied the witch who was the most buried. She didn’t have long. The dead witches at my feet were probably the ones who had died in service and been replaced, though I didn’t know if someone had dug up the dead and dragged them here or if the earth spit them out when it was done with them. I figured the Acheé witches were hidden elsewhere, intended as replacements for the ones nearly buried.
I had no idea how to get the witches out of the ground. No idea how to stop the spell they were powering. No idea what would happen if I interrupted a working full circle and pulled a witch to safety. But I knew who might know.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when my private cell buzzed in my pocket. I flipped it open to see Eli’s icon. “Jane,” I said.
“Where are you? Alex said you disappeared inside the vamp bar.”
I looked at the low boards over my head. I could almost make out his words through the floor as well as through the cell. “Would you believe about twenty feet from you? And down a level?”
“How?”
“The black arcs painted on the floor in each room are a witch circle. Don’t ask me how they go through the walls. I don’t know. But in the center of the house is a small square place without a door, like a tiny hidden room. I think the walls are spelled, so don’t try to break in when you find it. Whoever is accessing the witches belowground is using the circles to zip from other places to this tiny space.”
“So no one sees them coming or going,” he said. “And you, being so smart and all, stepped into the witch circle in the refrigerator in the bar. Just to test it out, right? Without a witch with you to tell you where you might end up.”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re an idiot.”
I felt the tension ease away from my shoulder and spine. “I love you too. Our witches are sitting down here, under the house, directly under the circle on the floor, half-buried in the ground. Misha’s here too. They’re locked into whatever working they’re being forced to do. I have no idea how to stop the working or save them, and one witch looks like she may be near death.”
“So, how do we get you out of there?”
“I don’t know that either. If you break through the walls, you may trigger a latent defensive spell and blow yourselves up. If you come through the floor, you may trigger a spell. I don’t know how we blew up the roof without blowing up all the witches.”
“What do you know?”
“You can try to send Soul through the witch circle at the bar. Maybe she can figure out something. Meanwhile tell Rick to call Evan Trueblood and tell him to take my call.”
“Okay. Done. Five on the call to Trueblood, ten on getting Soul to the bar.”
I hung up and checked the time. I had a few minutes, so I climbed the steps and pulled the trapdoor closed, sealing me in with Misha and her new pals. I didn’t want to be stuck down here with the stink and the decomposing bodies and the silent, half-buried witches, but I didn’t want Soul to materialize halfway inside me either. I also didn’t want Soul coming through the witch circle and falling through to the ground.
I walked around the circle again as I waited for time to go by, my light settling on each witch as I passed. The pocket watches were all open, each set at an even hour. I realized that each witch was buried at a point on a clock, and the position of the witch was the time on the clock. So far so good. The dead bodies in the center, near the stairs, were also laid out in a pattern, like spokes on a wheel. I had a feeling that the patterns made by living and dead witches were intended to increase the magical working, adding a layer of complication, another part of the outcome, whatever that outcome might be intended to accomplish.
I found the woman who had the magical number 12 on her amulet. She was elderly, with sagging skin and gaunt features. She had been here long enough to be sitting up to her waist in the soil. I wondered if the parts of her that were hidden belowground were dead already.
Misha hadn’t been here for long. I held the light over her legs, watching for a hint of human movement—a skin twitch, anything—but I could detect nothing. I wanted to feel for a pulse on the top of her foot, but touching her seemed dangerous for us both.
Dissatisfied, I returned to the steps and sat. When my five minutes were up, I hit speed dial for Evan Trueblood, husband to Molly Everhart Trueblood, once my best friend. Of course, that was before I killed her sister.
“This better be good,” Evan growled into my ear.
I almost smiled. “I’m in Natchez, Mississippi, standing below a witch circle painted in black on the floor of a single-story home. On my level are twelve witches, all buried to some extent in the earth, involved in a working that is sucking them down into the ground and killing them. Is that good enough?”
“If you stayed away from bloodsuckers, everybody would be safer.”
Which was mostly what I had been thinking not that long ago, but I was feeling obstinate. “Yeah, because you witches take such good care of your own problems. Like a dead body rolled in a carpet, and a witch using the death magics of dozens of dead witch children to get revenge and make herself beautiful and young again,” I accused, speaking of secrets the Everharts and Truebloods once kept. “So, yeah, go ahead. Blame me. It’s so much easier than taking responsibility for your own problems.”
I could almost feel the fury vibrating through Evan, but I wasn’t going to say anything nice to make it better. This had been a long time brewing. “Now,” I said, making it clear I was changing the subject back to relevant topics. “Do you want to bitch about it, or do you want to save some witches? Because if you don’t help, I’m going to try to free them, and we might all blow up.” The silence after my tirade was almost palpable.