Mark of the Witch

3

Hours later, my workday finished and another long night alone the only thing on my to-do list, I figured I had nothing to lose. If I had somehow tapped into a power beyond everyday witchcraft—which was really not a lot more than positive thinking, focus and luck, or so I’d always thought—then I might as well use it.

I put an old coffee mug I wasn’t overly fond of on the counter. It was a putrid yellow shade and had come with a set of four that someone had given me. I’d already broken the other three. Time to get rid of this one.

Standing back a few feet, I focused my eyes on the cup, my arm bent at the elbow, forefinger aimed at the ceiling. When I felt ready, I bought my arm down fast, aiming right at the mug and willing it to explode to smithereens.

It didn’t even wiggle.

Huh. Okay, reload and try again. This time I used a sideways sweep of my arms. But nothing. Drawing like a gunfighter didn’t work, either. I sank onto a stool for a break, and quickly flipped open my BlackBerry and searched for that video of me, found it, played it, reviewed my moves, tried to find a pattern.

Okay, okay, I had a little more flourish, a little more flair and a lot of anger in my black alien eyes, in the vid. I set the phone down, got to my feet, shook my arms and shoulders to loosen the muscles, cracked my knuckles. “All right, I got this. You’re going down, cup.”

I attacked again.

And again, the cup just stood there. I think it was looking defiant.

“Well, shit.”

I heaved a giant disappointed sigh and decided to resort to the more mundane forms of magic. Maybe I had been just a solitary, but I’d still been a witch. “And a witch knows how to deal with unwanted nightmares and hunky priests poking their nosy noses into her problems. Even if she can’t explode innocent coffee cups at will.”

I got busy moving furniture.

An hour later I stood back and surveyed my work.

The living room of my three-room apartment was no longer a living room but a temple. I’d pushed the love seat—love seat, what a joke—and chairs past the countertop that divided the living room from the eat-in kitchenette. They filled that tiny space. My psychedelic print love seat had my retro lime-green rocker recliner balanced precariously on top of it. I’d dragged the coffee table I’d rescued from the curb out of the way. It had started out ordinary, but I’d sanded it down, painted it yellow, and then added swirly vines and leaves and blossoms with teeth in them to cover its entire surface. The only thing that I’d paid for, besides the paint, was the custom cut piece of Plexiglas I’d screwed onto the top to protect it.

My living room was bare now, except for the contents of my old treasure chest. I’d laid out seashells and tumbled stones on the beige carpet—God, I hated beige—in a circle big enough to enclose the entire room. I’d set votive candles in tiny clear glass holders at the four cardinal points. I’d placed a black one in the center, inside my old iron cauldron.

I didn’t believe in magic anymore. I reminded myself of that over and over again. I was just doing this as a sort of … precaution. As a “just in case I’m wrong” thing. All the lights in my small apartment were turned off, except for the little bulb in the tall floor lamp whose base was a tarnished copper mermaid. I’d found it in a thrift store and scored it for ten bucks. It was worth a million to me. I had just enough light to work by, and I would turn even that off once I lit the candles.

My drapes were drawn, door locked, phones turned off. I was naked. I’d taken a quick shower to rinse away any negative vibes that might have been clinging to me from the day. It was tradition, and while I didn’t expect any of this to work, because I didn’t believe in magic, I also wanted to do it right. When the spell failed, I didn’t want to wonder if it was because I’d done a slipshod job of casting it.

I took a few deep breaths, and stepped into the circle of shells and stones, lifted my hand and imagined a beam of light drawing a magic circle of energy. I led it backward, following the outline of shells and stones. Counterclockwise. Widdershins, in witchspeak. I opened the quarters in reverse order, too, lighting candles as I went. This was a banishing spell, after all. I didn’t have formal coven training, but I knew my shit. I’d only half believed, even when I was practicing. But tonight I was going full throttle. Giving magic one final chance to prove to me that it was real.

I guess seeing myself on that video, wielding what looked like invisible power from my own two hands, had shaken my disbelief. Or maybe I was just wishing it was real. ‘Cause, hell, who wouldn’t?

With all the candles dancing and sandalwood incense filling the entire place with its exotic scent, I reached for the mermaid lamp and turned it off.

Soft yellow candlelight threw shadows around my feet that danced like little fairies and shadowy gnomes. I inhaled the scent of hot wax and dusky smoke. My body and mind responded instantly.

Because these are all psychological triggers due to repeated use in the past, shifting my brain waves into alpha rhythm. It’s not magic, it’s post-hypnotic suggestion.

Every ounce of tension left my muscles, my eyes went soft, and my lips pulled into a relaxed, easy smile. My heartbeat slowed. My breathing, too. Every part of me felt easier, lighter. And there was a tightness in my throat and a hotness behind my eyes.

Okay, okay, I miss it. Doesn’t make it real. Just makes it … nice.

I knelt in front of the black candle inside the cauldron in the center of the room, my eyes getting lost in the flame until it went out of focus and became a blob of light. “I call upon the darkest form of the Mother. I call upon the Lady of Death and Transformation. The Guardian of the Crossroads. She whose cold hand leads us from this life into the next. Goddess of the Underworld, of the dead, of the past, of every witch who ever lived, and those I have been before. I call you.” I closed my eyes, opened my arms, tilted my head back and waited to feel the presence of the Goddess, who I never called by any specific name.

But then, for some reason a name whispered from my lips without my consent. “Ishtar,” I whispered. “Ishtar, heed the call of thy priestess.” My eyes popped open. What made me say that?

A sudden crash spun me around as my big living room window exploded. I fell to one side, reflexively raising my arms to shield my face from the flying glass. The wind, on what had been a perfectly calm night, whipped my drapes inward and swirled through the apartment like a twister. The mermaid lamp slammed to the floor. My Warhol print soared off the wall and hit me in the forearm—aiming for my head.

The candles blew out, and the whirlwind kept raging.

I jumped to my feet to try to deal with it, though I had no idea how—turn on the light? cover the window? call 9-1-1?—but something stopped me. I held steady, somehow knowing I had to ignore the chaos and finish what I’d started.

I sank onto my knees once again, the windstorm still raging around me, my hair blowing into tangles that would rival Medusa’s, and resumed the goddess pose, arms up and outstretched. “Nightmares have plagued me. But they will plague me no more. I banish them!”

The wind seemed to grow even stronger.

“This priest who follows me, thinking I am some relic of a past life, I banish him, as well. He will plague me no more! By the power of Ishtar, I command it!”

Hell, that doesn’t even sound like my own voice….

Rising to my feet, I stood in the circle’s center, and spun widdershins, slowly at first, then faster and faster. “I banish the dreams, I banish the priest, banish the dreams, banish the priest, be gone, be gone, be gone, be gone!” With the final words I let myself sink to the floor, releasing the spell into the universe as the wind kept whipping around me. I closed my eyes to stop the room from spinning and muttered, “So mote it be.”

Something growled at me, long and low, like a wolf about to spring.

From my position on the floor, feeling almost too shocked to move, I opened my eyes. “What the fuck was that?”

The cauldron in the middle of the floor was swirling with colors that glowed and shifted and moved. It was the only light in the room. And the growl … It came again. From that cauldron.

I crawled closer and looked at the impossible.

The swirling, hazy colors inside the cauldron were real. I stared into them, through them. A shape formed. A torso—nude, male, muscular. And then a head, a man’s head, except that it wore a demonically twisted grimace of anger, and its eyes blazed red with an energy that blasted me with pure pain. It hit me hard, and I couldn’t look away. And as I stared unwillingly at the image of the beast inside the cauldron, it opened its mouth and released a roar of anguish and rage. It had fangs. Cloven hooves. A tail?

The Devil himself?

But I don’t believe in the Devil.

I jerked backward, but it held my eyes. I tried, I really did, to look away, but it was like this thing held me.

And then the image in the cauldron changed. The colors swirled again, overtaking the beast, hiding him, and then changing from oranges and reds and yellows to soft blues and gentle greens as a different face formed. A woman’s face this time, a black-haired beauty in flowing robes. Her brows were thick and dark, her eyes like shining chunks of coal.

I know her! She’s one of the women from my dream!

Her full lips parted, and she whispered two words. “Help him.”

“Who? The priest?”

The beautiful woman lowered her eyes to look down, into the swirling orange and yellow depths at the demon I’d just seen.

“Him?”

“Help him.”

“But I don’t … I don’t know how. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. How am I—Wait. Wait!” I reached my hand toward the iron kettle as if I could grab hold of the image inside, but it was fading. The cauldron turned slowly black again. “At least tell me your name!” But it was useless. She was gone.

Lilia.

The wind died with a soft sound that might have been nothing more than its final gasping breeze. I stayed on the floor, lowered my head to the carpet and tried to hold back the crying jag that was fighting to bust out.

Great. I’m being sacrificed again.

I stood near the cliff, not on the edge yet, but tied between two posts nearby, arms raised and stretched to either side. The goddess position again. Memories—yeah, memories, not illusions—flooded my brain. I heard a crack and felt the brutal slash of a whip slicing my back, and it was as real as anything I’ve ever felt in my life. And far more painful. It went on until the cutting, burning pain was everywhere all at once. I was shaking all over in agony. It was unbearable, and I longed to pass out, but I didn’t.

I screamed until my voice was gone and I could scream no more. My faith went with it, severed along with the ropes that held me as the soldiers cut me down and retied my hands behind my bleeding back. Then I—no, we—were marched closer to the edge of the cliff. I’d seen him again, that other man near the rocks, where soldiers held him. He was more battered and beaten than we were. He’d been forced to watch as we’d been whipped, and he was being forced to watch still, as we were about to be sent plummeting to our deaths on the rocks far, far below. He struggled, though he had to be near death. Hell of a man, that one. Too bad they probably killed him right after us.

I looked sideways at my sister Lilia. She was the youngest, and I was amazed at how straight she stood. How proudly she held her head. She looked like royalty. I was crying softly, almost silently, unlike my other sister, Magdalena, who was loud and sloppy. But little Lilia, the one we’d always thought of as the weakest of us, had been as cruelly tortured as we had, and yet she was the strong one now.

We were at the cliff’s edge.

Wakeupwakeupwakeup!

I felt those warm, familiar hands at my back. And again I had that totally fucked-up feeling of liking his touch. His palms warm on my skin, carefully not touching the raw ruin of my flesh. My toes curled instinctively to grip the smooth stone beneath my feet, trying to hang on.

I was going to die on those rocks down there. With my sisters.

Again.

4

Tomas had parked his Volvo across the street from Indira Simon’s apartment building, where he had a beautiful view of her windows, and spent the entire night there, trying to keep watch, hoping he would know if something went wrong. He saw other tenants come and go, and at one point, while out stretching his legs, he caught the door before it swung closed and jammed the latch, so he could get in if necessary.

Yes, he’d thought Father Dom was two-thirds of the way to insanity with his obsessive predictions about this demon and its witches. Until he’d seen that subway video. And met her. That woman was something else. He could feel it just by looking into her eyes. And when she’d swung her arm in anger, a burst of genuine power had erupted from her.

She’d been as surprised by that as he had.

And now everything he’d been so sure was just the outrageous exaggerations of an aging priest with delusions of grandeur seemed like it just might be real, after all. Which threw everything else he thought he’d known into question.

His crisis of faith, his decision to leave the church, all of that, he’d decided, had to be put aside until this was finished. Because if he’d been wrong—well, he couldn’t undo that. But he could carry out this mission for Dom, at least far enough to make sure it really was just part of an old man’s ramblings. Maybe generations of old men. The rest … the rest could wait.

He knew already that some things Dom had told him were utterly false. Things about her. She was not evil. No demon’s whore. Not that one. She hadn’t tried to seduce him or ensorcell him as Dom had predicted she would. She’d run from him instead.

But he’d followed. Because he had a feeling that just wouldn’t leave him alone. Clearly some of the things Dom had believed in for so long were true. Were, perhaps, unfolding as had been predicted. And the most important thing that meant to Tomas was that she might be in danger. So while this would be his final mission as a priest, it was still his mission—and he was still a priest. And he intended to do it right. Maybe that would assuage his guilt over leaving the collar behind, and for not believing in Dom’s obsession until now.

He had expected that he might catch a glimpse of Indy moving around behind her apartment windows, though the drapes were drawn. He had not expected to see her on the building’s rooftop just before dawn.

When he caught sight of her up there his heart almost stopped. She was standing near the brick safety wall, which reached almost to her bare shoulders, her hands along the top of it, the wind blowing through her hair. It looked as if she was getting ready to climb up.

“God, save her,” he whispered.

He was out of the car instantly, racing to the building’s door and yanking it open, glad he’d thought far enough ahead to disable the lock. He took the stairs two at a time all the way to the roof. Then he slid to a stop. She was standing on the wall now, completely naked. Wobbling dangerously, she held her arms behind her back as if they were tied there, even though they weren’t. It was still dark, but there was something staining her back—crisscrossing stripes with scarlet rivulets running from them. And something else, a tattoo on her lower back. Three rows of symbols.

Was that cuneiform?

God, what had happened to her? And what was he supposed to do?

Waking a sleepwalker was a bad idea—especially when they were standing seventy feet off the ground. But he couldn’t just let this play out and hope she didn’t plummet to her death.

Quietly, he approached from behind. She was standing still, her short hair riffled by the wind, her skin pebbling with goose bumps in the cold. She had to be freezing. It was the second of November, for crying out loud. As he crept slowly nearer, she leaned forward, arching her back. No more time. Tomas lunged, snapping his arms around her just above hip level, which was as high as he could reach. The momentum of her body tried to pull him over with her, but he braced one foot against the brick wall and jerked her backward, hard. He landed on his back on the rooftop with her butt on his chest and her lower back against his face. No sooner had he begun to release his pent-up breath in a sigh of relief than she was scrambling off him and onto her feet, turning to look down at him, stark accusation in her huge black eyes.

“Atta bal

Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed straight down, as if her legs had dissolved beneath her.

Tomas got onto his feet. She’d bled on his clothes. On his face. Her back was cut to ribbons. Bending, he gathered her carefully into his arms, then turned to carry her back down to her apartment.

“Owwwww.”

I was facedown on my bed and hurting like hell, and when I tried to roll over, a strong male hand on my shoulder kept me lying where I was.

Who the hell is that, and what is he doing in my apartment?

I twisted my head to see. It was him. Of course it was him. Hunky Father Tomas was sitting on the edge of my bed. His face was twisted with what looked like worry, and his hands held gauze and a bottle of something aromatic.

“Father Tomas? What happened? Why are you here? And why the hell am I hurting so bad?” I craned my neck a little farther and got a nice clear view of my own bare ass. “I’m naked!” I tried to roll over again, but his hand held me still.

“It’s all right, I’m a priest.” He wasn’t trying to be funny. He tugged the bedsheet up a little to cover my cheeks. “Lie very still or it’ll hurt even more. If you’ll stop trying to roll, I’ll show you what’s hurting in the mirror.” The bed moved as he got up and walked to my dresser. I tried to remember whether I’d left anything embarrassing on it. Tampons, undies. I wasn’t exactly an immaculate housekeeper. He was back in seconds, holding my silver hand mirror at an angle that allowed me to see my back. And when I did, my stomach heaved and I closed my eyes. My back was covered with deep, long cuts. Stripes. Like a whip would leave behind if—

A whip.

“Shit.”

The nightmare or memory or hallucination or whatever the hell it was came back to me so hard and fast I had to jam my face into the pillow to muffle the sob that lurched inside my chest. I was pretty sure he heard it anyway.

“What happened last night?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I turned far enough so my words could emerge unmuffled. “I was … I was trying to work a spell. You must have seen the living room.”

“I saw the circle. The candles. Figured that much out.”

Frowning, I twisted my head a little farther. “The circle. The candles … that’s all?” He hadn’t mentioned the shattered window, broken glass, toppled lamp, tangled curtains.

“Furniture piled in the kitchen?”

I blinked. “There was a storm. It smashed the window to hell and gone.”

He was staring at me, silent.

“Didn’t it?”

He shook his head slowly. “It must have been part of another nightmare,” he said. “I spotted you on the roof. You damn near went over the side, but …”

“But you saved me.” I no longer cared if he saw my tears. He’d seen my bare ass and my living nightmare. What were a few tears?

“I was across the street in my car. I saw you up there and—They’re going away.”

“What?” I was confused by the sudden change of subject.

“The wounds, they’re … they’re going away.” He held up the mirror again.

I ignored it. Pushing past him and his mirror to get to my feet, dragging the sheet with me and holding it in front of my body, I turned my back toward the large mirror on my dresser and looked over my shoulder at my reflection.

The stripes across my back were closing up, forming small pink lines, like battle scars, but then they started fading, too. There was a tattoo, as well, on my lower back, and I knew damn well I’d never had a tattoo in my life. Odd little symbols in neat rows. But they, too, were fading fast. Ten seconds, I stood there. Tomas came and stood right beside me, staring into that mirror. I didn’t even care that my ass was exposed again. Ten seconds, and at the end of them nothing remained of those ghastly wounds except for a few smears of blood Tomas must have missed in his ministrations.