Child, p.12
Child, page 12
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“We’re witches.”
“He’s a demon,” Samantha said darkly.
“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “He’s a dick.”
“Don’t do it, Ashley.”
“The rules,” Ashley said, looking at Samantha with agony. “They make my head spin.”
Samantha shook her head, checking in with Sam again. He wasn’t losing ground, at least. Things elsewhere in the warehouse had his attention, but the profound stroke of pain, one too significant and abrupt for her to have even felt it, wasn’t enduring. She was going to have to figure out how to shove him back into his own head, but that was a problem for another minute.
She drew a gun and pointed it at Ashley.
“Don’t do it.”
Deceit. She’d spent years of her life doing research out of demonic texts that were saturated with deception and untruth, and she’d learned a lot about how demons lied. Or at least, how to cope with the fact that they did.
“You know that doesn’t matter,” Ashley said, drawing back the knife as she stood over Sam. Samantha pulled the trigger. The gun kicked to one side and the bullet punched a hole through the garage door. Ashley barely glanced at her.
Human.
Well, that was the first step. The rest could wait until later. Samantha dropped her backpack and put her hand in, bending time to give herself a chance to identify the right vial without rooting around. She had fractions of a second to spare, if she got it right the first time. If she was wrong, the knife would already be on its way down, and there was a good chance Sam would get stabbed, regardless.
She counted them out, fifth vial from the end, and closed her fingers on it, nails under the lid where it was least likely to slip when she pulled it out. Lahn was halfway into her sheath as Samantha threw the vial at Ashley, underhand with a quick flip that took ages with time crawling, and in the same motion, with Lahn secured away, Samantha drew the other gun and watched, slower, slower, slower, as she came into alignment with the vial.
She pulled the trigger and watched as the projectile, a steel bullet cased in lead, zoomed away, only bent-time seconds before it hit, exploding the burgundy potion into the air. Ashley’s head ticked to the side and she fell alongside Sam. Samantha had swallowed the salamander leaf that morning that protected her from the effect, as had Sam. She put away the gun and drew Lahn again, shouldering her backpack and moving on.
Sam pulled her into the main room with a firm awareness that she needed to be quiet and cautious. The magic of the place, drained of people, crackled.
Samantha let the door ease closed and edged over to the bar, kneeling. The door to the basement flew open.
“…buyers are going to be very disappointed if their skins don’t cure before sale. It’s going to cost me seven hundred or more in lost revenue. I want to know why you haven’t found the leak that brought them here in the first place.”
Samantha watched a short man with Beaver Cleaver hair walk across the room toward the garage, surrounded by a cloud of young men identical to the one who had intercepted her downstairs the first night. Something was bothering Sam greatly. Something downstairs that kept drawing his attention. Samantha was willing to be led, but only so far. That was potentially a demon, with a bunch of minions, heading to a room where Sam was laying on the floor unconscious.
She stood, letting Lahn swish through the air like a cat’s tail.
“Anadidd’na ana’nae. Eloi Anadidd’na Anu’dd. Anadidd’na anu’dd parroah’na lahn.”
God’s greetings. My name is ‘hello, friend’. I am the bonded champion of righteous victory.
She turned her head down to watch their reactions, eyes narrowed. The hissing was spontaneous and uncontrolled as they spun to face her. Tony let loose a stream of profanity in hellspeak, accusations and slander and raw violence. His minions charged her en masse and Sam’s attention drew in tight on her bag. Feeling the surge of adrenaline and satisfaction as the horde came at her, he wanted her to use the potions she’d prepared.
Not likely.
She bent time as the demons began glitching one at a time, feeling her out. They operated like a gang, all violence and bravado and very little tactical consideration. She was certain she surprised them when she ashed the first one.
What did they think she was, turning up with a psychic and speaking angeltongue? Some kind of amateur?
Sam warned her of one of them behind her and she blocked the fist with a blade. There was a scream, primal and inhuman, and then the sound of ash falling. Lahn didn’t care for survivors. Forged by an angel, she had a particular vengeance and power against lower demons, like these.
Two more down and they backed off.
“They aren’t worth your time,” Tony hissed as his minions scattered to the edges of the warehouse. Sam was tugging at her urgently to get downstairs. Lahn wanted more. So did Samantha.
“How dare you?” she said. “How dare you?”
He snarled.
“I do what I please. They’re just animals. You one of those greasy vegans in bamboo shoes? Or are you going to leave me to my business?”
“They’re people,” Samantha said. “And they deserve better.”
“What are you?” he asked. She glared.
“You haven’t heard?”
He jerked his chin.
“Powerful, from the look of that shiny bit of steel, there. Someone who knows some things.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t broken any of the rules. They signed up. They took the risk.” He grinned, revealing pointy teeth. “I’m the risk.”
“No,” Samantha said. “I’ve heard your arguments before. Put my fist through the front of his face. They’re people and you don’t get to pretend they aren’t.”
Sam tugged harder and Samantha relented. She leaned over the bar and picked up her backpack, pulling it up onto her shoulder.
“I’m going to go, now,” she said. She flung Lahn to one side, skewering a demon to the wall as he ashed. “Anyone still here when I come back upstairs is going to end up like him. No one touches Ashley or the psychic in the next room. I will hunt you to hell, I give you my word, if you so much as breathe on either one of them.” She drew a rosewood stick out of her bag and walked toward Tony, letting her hips sway. “Except you.” Demons and their curiosity. “You’re staying until I get back, and then we’re going to talk about how to treat a lady.”
She slid the rosewood into his pocket and his eyes went wide. She smiled and winked, then dashed down the stairs. Sam pulled her directly to the first room. The door was locked. Sam pulled harder. Whatever he was watching was almost unbearable. Samantha looked down the row with a sinking feeling. She needed to get in to all of these rooms, and fast.
What she needed was Jason.
Or Carter.
The two of them were dragons, independent in the extreme and powerful in the face of anything that would stop them from going where they wanted to go. She’d never met a lock designer who could keep Carter out, and Jason had a special gift for opening doors that often bordered on brutish.
She bent time to give herself more space. They’d bolted Sam. There was no telling what they’d done to these doors, though the buzz of energy under her palms told her that it was big and complicated.
She didn’t have the time - or the resources - to untangle the mix of magics Tony might have imagined to lock the girls in their rooms, and Sam’s urgency bordered on sickness, now.
She hoped for a burst of inspiration, a magic that would transmit enough power to protect her from the traps in the locks and dismantle them at the same time. Something intense and personal and unique. Nothing came.
And then a different form of inspiration hit her.
Jason.
He had almost no aptitude for magic, outside of what the dragonsword gave him and the little bit of personal magic he’d picked up to pass her initiation tests. What would he do?
She tentatively felt the mechanisms of the locks under her hands, then took a decisive step back, drew her gun, and shot the door.
She took a step to the side and pulled on the handle. The door swung open easily, and a girl slumped out onto the floor. Samantha could smell the gas that rushed out of the room, and with a few minutes, she probably could have identified the different components of it and how it was acting on them, but from the look of the girl huddled on the dark stones, she didn’t have a few minutes. She moved on down the row, shooting each door and pulling it open. Most of the girls were against their doors, but three of them, Samantha had to go in after.
Their skin was purpling and their fingers twitched. One of them was still alert enough to shriek at Samantha when Samantha pulled her out into the hallway, pulling away and clutching at her own arms.
“You’re okay,” Samantha said, leaving her on the floor and moving on. They’d clawed at their own skin, and Samantha saw more than one with hair tangled through her fingers. She could only imagine what they’d gone through. What Sam had had to watch.
She was feeling light-headed and itchy by the time she was done, and the hall was filled with the dispersed gases. Samantha had found three different poisons she knew by scent and she was still working on sorting the rest of them out. Weakened, she had no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before she became incapacitated, but she needed to get back to the Mustang to get the rest of her supplies in order to mix antidotes for all of them, and she needed to be a lot better than simply functional to do that.
One by one, she dragged the women up into the main room as Tony stood, staring. He looked like a frightened pigeon, bug-eyed and alert, but immobile. The rest of his herd was gone.
Finally the basement was clear. Samantha closed the door and stood over the women for a moment, checking vitals. One was dead and another might have been beyond Samantha’s ability to help her. Kathleen was weak, limp and motionless, but Samantha thought she would survive.
“Who are you?” Tony asked through gritted teeth.
“Do you not speak?” she asked conversationally, checking in with Sam again. He had started worrying over how to get back into his body in a fidgety sort of way. He flagged her off again, and she turned her focus back to Tony with a demon-quality smile.
“This is Lahn,” she said, going to pull the sword out of the wall and letting her catch the light. Without looking, Samantha felt Tony’s attention grow intense. If he’d been human, his heart rate would have spiked and his breathing would have gone shallow. Samantha dropped her backpack and made a show of digging through it to find the tool she was looking for.
What she brought out looked like a brass bubble wand with a telescoping handle. She pulled it to its full length and blew through it as she came to stand in front of Tony. She gave him another twisted smile and held up the wand in front of him.
“You ever see one of these before?”
He spat verbal filth at her again and she shrugged.
“They’re fun.” She put her hand behind his neck and pressed the wand against his throat, deep into the soft tissue where his neck met his jaw.
“Where are the skins?”
He opened his mouth, eyes shooting rage at her, and choked. She pursed her lips and shook her head.
“I really don’t have the time or patience for you to figure this one out.”
She drew the stiletto from her boot and slid it along his throat and down toward his belly, without moving the wand. The corner of her mouth turned up.
“Truth, Tony. As distasteful as that’s going to be, that’s all you can give me right now. And until you do, I’m going to give you pain.”
She slid the point of the dagger into his stomach and he again tried to berate her in hellspeak. All that came out of his mouth was a croaking noise.
“One more time, Tony. Where are they?”
He blinked.
“In my office. Hidden in a safe in the ceiling.”
“And how do I open it?”
“It’s a combination.” He gave her the numbers. She blinked a faux-charming smile.
“And how do I open it safely?”
That was considerably more complicated, and involved multiple stages to overcome the wards, traps, and mechanical lockouts.
“Who are you?” he asked again.
“Say hi to Brandt for me,” she answered, speaking a few words of angeltongue over him, then taking a step back and stashing the wand in her back pocket, replacing it in her hand with the gun that had failed to hit Ashley. She shot him twice in the forehead and caught her stiletto as it fell to the floor with the ash, putting it away in one motion and the gun in the next.
<><><>
She made a sickroom out of the open floor of the club, tending the Selkies and the three normal humans who had had the bad luck to end up with them. Ashley woke a few hours later and Samantha bandaged her hand and set her to work.
“He’s dead,” Ashley said after a few minutes.
“He is, as far as your pelt matters,” Samantha answered.
“Where is it?” Ashley asked.
“I put them in a tub of water behind the bar,” Samantha told her. “It isn’t salt water, but it should help.”
Ashley stood from where she was working on rubbing oils on a girl’s skin and raced across the room. There was a sloshing noise as she threw pelts aside and ultimately stood with a sealskin pressed against her chest.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What are you doing?” Samantha asked.
“I’m sorry I hurt you and Sam,” she said, a bit frantic. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“They need you,” Samantha said, indicating the women on the floor. “Don’t you care about them at all?”
“It’s MINE,” Ashley yelled, hugging her pelt against her chest harder. “MINE.”
“Ashley,” Samantha said, standing fully upright now and putting her hands on her hips. “No one is taking it from you.”
“Get away. Get away from me.”
Samantha held her hands out, bewildered, then stood, shaking her head, as Ashley sprinted to the door and slammed her body against it.
And then she was gone.
Samantha expected Sam to follow her, but he signaled that he was stuck. She sent him sympathy and a query on whether he needed help immediately and again he made sure she was spending her energy on the women. And herself. He warned her that she was fading and needed to make sure she didn’t neglect to treat herself.
<><><>
One by one, the women woke up. Half-healed, still in limping pain, each of them demanded their pelt and left in a confusion of anger and immediacy. By the last one, Samantha simply expected it. The three non-witches, she eventually explained to them that there had been an incident, and they’d been poisoned with gases they’d inhaled. Tony had fled to avoid the consequences, and they needed to spend a few days at home recuperating. They could get follow-up medical treatment if they felt like they needed it, but there wouldn’t be much anyone would be able to do that time wouldn’t do all on its own.
And then Samantha was on her own.
She went to find Sam.
He was unmoved, lying on a small brown stain where the puddle of blood had finally stopped growing. His hair stuck in it, as she picked him up and looked at his eyes again. The pupils were still huge, terrifying, like he was no longer in there. Sam mentally observed that he really wasn’t in there, if you thought about it. Samantha had been able to drag the women up the stairs through brute force and necessity, but there was no way she was going to be able to get Sam to the car, not to mention up into their third-story hotel room. She sat on the floor, at a loss for what to do next.
She needed help.
She pressed her back against the wall, reaching into herself and finding the controls that governed the many functions of her body. As gently as she could, trying to avoid putting herself under so hard that the club staff would find her unconscious several hours later, she went to sleep.
<><><>
She found Sam drifting out in her dream state and latched onto him the way she had learned to, negotiating for a moment whose dream they would use, but his awareness was weak and his concept of sleep disorganized so she pulled him across and opened her eyes to the park bench where they would sit to talk.
“Are you okay?” she asked, turning her head. He was watching the trees and how they leaned in the slight, wandering breeze through the park.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “What’s a dark bolt?”
“It’s an energy,” she said. “She grounded it through your brain.”
“Does that normally cause damage?” he asked.
“Like any other lightning bolt,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“Like I can’t get out of a vision.”
“And you’re trapped in the warehouse?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t get you to the car. And it’s possible that taking you across the threshold, it would hit you again. I don’t know if you’d even survive.”
“You have to do something.”
“I know. But I don’t know what.”
They were quiet for a few minutes, watching as a jogger went by going one direction, and then a mother with a double-wide stroller in the other direction.
“I can’t believe Ashley just ran off like that.”
“No one ever promised you gratitude,” Sam told her.
“I know. But we risked our lives to get her out and she just left. Were they not her friends?”
“Addiction is a funny thing,” Sam said.
“Maybe so.”
“Could she have helped?”
“With the other Selkies? Yes. With you? Probably not. She didn’t know what she was doing, casting the spells she was casting. Just knew enough to throw them up.”
“You need to clear them all, don’t you?” Sam asked.
“I should. It would take me a month to do it, though. Rather just burn the place down.”
“Would that work?”
“Most of the symbolism of a building is going to be enough to take down protection spells with it. You need some kind of boundary for them to stick to, and the weaker that boundary is, like a fence or whatever, the weaker the spell is.”
