Dark Heir

Eli rolled his head on his shoulders and I heard a faint pop as his spine relaxed into place. “Good. I’m taking a shooter position up there.” He pointed with his weapon to the top of the Rousseau mausoleum. It had a small, flat roof ridge, not quite wide enough for a normal human to lie down on, but enough for a former active-duty Ranger to get comfy and get his weapon ready. And the sword held by the vampire angel was canted at a nice angle to tie off a rappel line for a quick dismount. I shooed him with my fingers and he trotted off; I turned my attention to the witches and asked Bruiser, “What’d I miss?”

“They’re drawing a double circle. No, make that a triple circle.”

I snorted in disgust. “This is looking like a whole lotta hurry up and wait.”

Bruiser lifted a single eyebrow in that Leo-like gesture and said, “We could play blackjack. Or strip poker. I’m very, very good at poker, so it would prove interesting.”

From out of the dark I heard Eli snort, this time sounding much like my own. I just shook my head and levered myself up onto the SUV hood to lean against the windshield for a little catnap. But I found myself watching the witches, Molly in particular, as they discussed the working they were going to try and shared the carefully spoken syllables of the easiest wyrd spell.

“Vo. Co. . . . E. X. Cie. O.” They spoke the syllables with no inflection and with irregular pauses between to avoid releasing the spell. Testing a new spell was dangerous. Testing someone else’s spell was triply dangerous. I hoped they had done their investigation properly, that the mathematics were correct and the wyrd wouldn’t blow them all to tiny, bloody, messy pieces.

The witches used string and a stick to mark three circles, then went to work with small shovels, digging the circles out. It should have been backbreaking work, but I realized that they weren’t creating new circles, but simply cleaning out preexisting furrows, removing the loam and grass to reveal channels made with concrete mixed with white shells. From the condition of the grass, they hadn’t been used in decades, but clearly Sabina had left her territory ready to take up her witchery at any point. The string had been used to measure out and find the circles, not to create circles.

Four witches stepped back against the mausoleum walls, Molly among them, as five witches stepped inside the middle circle. The five sat in the traditional pentagram positions—which was one of the best circles for a combined working. Sabina was sitting at the position for north and clapped her hands once, to call them to . . . I didn’t know what. Attention maybe. Or to announce it was time to get started. A circle opened around them, and the middle, white, concrete furrow glowed with a reddish light, flickered, and stabilized.

Sabina said a version of what I’d heard Molly say before. “We ward our space with the power of the wind and rain, the moon, the earth and all that lives upon it, the stone of the heart of the mountains, and the energy of fire. All power is gifted by the Creator, and to her we offer homage . . .”

Her? Interesting. But I didn’t dispute the gender of the Creator God. He—she—whatever—had no gender, so any pronoun would do as well as any other. And calling God it seemed disrespectful.

The middle circle flared, merging with the energies of the far warning circle. The powers paled from reddish to pink and then to a deep purple before the circle evened out again, looking as smooth and unbreakable as plasticized glass. As they murmured, getting the rhythm right, they initiated the first steps of an inverted hedge of thorns in the center circle, turning a proactive shield spell into a trap spell, but this spell felt different from the ones I’d seen before, smelled sharper on the air. Yeah. This was a different trap from the one they’d used before.

The hedge spell smelled the way the world did in the middle of a major thunderstorm—stronger, creating a tingle of static electricity in the air—as opposed to the way the Everhart sisters’ spell felt, which was more like the air when a storm is brewing but still far off. This hedge also felt different from the same spell that had been opened on the grounds of the Louis Armstrong Park. They had used five witches then too, but only three had been strong practitioners; two had been weakly gifted. That night, I didn’t see Butterfly Lily and her mother, Feather Storm. There were five strong witches in the working, a well-balanced blend of talents. The power signature was stronger.

So far, it was pretty much what I was used to, but with enough differences to make me wary. The witches were chanting something too softly to hear, the words not in English or Gaelic or Latin, not in any Romance tongue I recognized, all of which were languages I had heard witches and shamans use before. But it was something different, maybe tribal American. Not Cherokee—the consonants were too hard and sharp for that. But maybe something else tribal, a language that I didn’t know.

Molly’s mouth turned down in a frown. She didn’t know the language either, but the local witches did, even Sabina. Interesting-er and interesting-er. How would Sabina know a local witch language unless she had been working with them? In secret or something. Yeah. That. More vamp games. I wondered how long that had been going on. It couldn’t have started until after I’d gotten to NOLA, so probably less than a year. Maybe. Or maybe not.

They stopped speaking and the circles fell. Or they went inactive; I could see over and around the circles, but there was still a faint glow. Sabina stepped to the center of the inner circle and gestured for all the women to join her. They all came close, even Molly, who was looking more and more like a fish out of water. Sabina talked to them, her voice soothing and peaceful, but with the nine witches it was still a lot like a huddle of football players discussing the next play.

I could have listened if I’d strained, but the days of lack of rest caught up with me. I fell sound asleep. I dreamed about my soul home, but it was a confusing dream, and a different place, the walls blackened as if by fire, the smell of sour smoke hanging on the damp air. It smelled unused. It sounded silent. It felt cold and empty.

I woke when Bruiser’s scent changed, my eyes opening wide. A heartbeat later, his hand landed on my ankle and I sat upright.

“No,” he said. “I won’t allow that.”

Sabina said, “We dare not utilize the same sequence of spells and incantations and wyrds that we used last. We are stronger now, with time to prepare and with five full practitioners on the regnum circle and four on the outer protego circle. We have more options, but we must be prepared for the unforeseen and the unexpected. In return, we must attempt that which is untried and unanticipated.”