Fire Raiser (34 page)

Holly had been watching Cam, who was chewing on his inner cheek so vehemently that she was worried he’d gnaw right through the dimple. “What?” she demanded.

Both dimples—undamaged—appeared. “We don’t need a way out. We need a way up.”

Nineteen

THERE BEING NO JACKHAMMER, power drill, blowtorch, or similar contraption available that conformed to the already outraged laws of physics, they were stuck with magic.

Among the Witches, a lot of thinking was going on. Every so often one of them would say something, they’d all cogitate for a while, frowns would be frowned or nods would be nodded, and then they’d do some more thinking.

Lachlan had seen it all before. He busied himself with the baby, making sure she was warm and dry. She wouldn’t be hungry for a couple of hours yet, and how they were going to get her mother to provide if she wasn’t willing to do so was something nobody had mentioned. The girl was still peacefully asleep, Cam’s knotted string around her finger. So, too, Bernhardt Weiss—although one could wish his sleep wasn’t so peaceful.

Alec, with his uncanny instinct for identifying what kind of Witch a Witch might be, had studied Weiss for several long minutes before shaking his head. “He isn’t. There’s not a quiver of magic about him.”

Lachlan glanced around. “Well? Who’s gonna say it?”

“What?” Jamey asked.

“ ‘That’s impossible.’ ”

“Evan, you cut me to the quick.” Alec shook his head mournfully. “To think that my very own nephew-in-law doesn’t think I can—”

“Oh, do hush,” Nicky told him. “It isn’t impossible at all. We’ve only been assuming he’s the source of the magic around here—the stairs, the barriers—”

“—the fires?” Jamey looked from one face to another. No one was willing to speculate. “Well, then, what about the girl?”

Alec stood staring and clenching his fists beside her gurney for an even longer time. At last he shrugged. “Whatever she is, I’ve never seen such a tangle of impulses and distortions. My apologies, Evan, this one really is an impossibility. For now.”

So they’d given up the idea of tapping either or both for some extra power.

Jamey stood around looking as useless as Lachlan, also watching all that thinking going on. The kid was as disoriented as if somebody had moved his food dish. Lachlan wondered if his own expression had been as helpless and befuddled the first time he’d witnessed a full-on ritual Working. Compassion—and knowledge that he needed the man sharp-witted, not confused—sent him to his friend’s side as the five Witches made their preparations.

“This is the ‘Gathering the Goodies’ part,” he said. “Alec or Nicky could give you a whole series of lectures about associations of one thing with another, how this corresponds to that—”

“Cam mentioned a bit about trees.”

Lachlan kept half an ear on the consultations going on nearby. “Water is a good, steady Element,” Nicky was saying, “but it would take forever to work on all that concrete.”

“Trees?” Evan repeated.

“Traditions of folk magic—I kept waiting for him to mention willow bark and salicylic acid—”

“That’s folk medicine, not folk magic. And whatever he said, you didn’t especially believe him. No, it’s okay—I’ve been watching this kind of thing for almost five years now, and there are times when I still don’t believe it, either. Even if you’re part of the Working, it’s pretty unreal.”

“It
is
real, though.”

“Oh, yeah.” Evan hesitated, then reached into his shirt and brought out the silver medal. “St. Michael, patron of law enforcement. Blessed by Pope John Paul II his very own self, or so I’m told. Holly got it for me in Rome a few years back. And then she spelled it, with some help from Nicky and Alec, and—”

“Evan?” Holly called out. “Lighter?”

He dug into his jacket pocket and produced a silver Zippo. He let Jamey take a look at its engraving: a five-pointed star encircled by the words UNITED STATES MARSHALS SERVICE–FOUNDED SEPTEMBER 24, 1789. Then he tossed it to his wife.

“Fire?” Lulah scoffed. “Against all that concrete you just mentioned?”

Jamey’s eyes widened a bit at the prospect of a general conflagration. Lachlan told him, “She’s kidding, trust me. The lighter will do duty as the Element of—wait for it—Fire. Normally it’d be a candle—in fact, a whole bunch of candles, one for each of the cardinal points of the compass, another one to represent the person standing there, a couple-three on the altar—”

“Altar? How deep does the religion part of it go?”

Lachlan grinned. “Well, I’m Catholic, so technically I’m supposed to run screaming from the room. But it’s not as peculiar as you’d think. The air-fire-earth-water thing is all over the Mass. Incense, Presence Lamp—”

“—body and blood of Christ?”

“Think of the Virgin Mary as the Great Goddess. It’s all very feminist—by the way, if you value your sanity, don’t ever get Holly started on the patriarchy.”

“Lulah!” Alec wore an exaggerated look of surprise. “I’ve been known to make the Earth move, but only for Nicholas, and only in private—”

Evan snorted. Jamey blushed and said, “I was kind of wondering . . . I mean, Alec and Nick . . .”

“Yeah?”

“They’re gay.”

“Yeah?”

“So is Cam.”

Evan shrugged. “So is Professor Dumbledore.”

Jamey gaped.
“What?”

“Damn. I shouldn’t have said that. Don’t tell Alec and Nicky I told you, okay?”

“Is it—give me a break here, Ev, these are the first Witches I’ve ever met!”

“Oh, you mean do you have to be gay to be a Witch if you’re a man?” he laughed. “Hell, no. You’re born the way you’re born, gay or straight, Witch or not.” Then, raising his voice a little: “That’s expensive incense, Cam!”

He glanced over and grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

Jamey blinked. “They’re using—”

“You work with what you got. At least it won’t make Holly sneeze. It’s Native American tradition—and the Flynns have some Cherokee in them, so it’s appropriate.” He eyed Jamey sidelong. “You didn’t know?”

“Another bullet point in a long list.”

“You already knew everything important about him. I knew everything I needed to know about Holly way before I found out she’s a Witch.”

“And it didn’t make a difference?”

“Get real. Of course it made a difference.”

He shifted restlessly from foot to foot. “In how you cared about her, or in why?”

“Both. In some ways, Shakespeare was wrong, Jamey. Love does alter when it alteration finds. People change, and it’s not just wrong to think they don’t, it’d be cruel to expect them not to. To tell somebody that you love her just the way she is, and don’t ever change—” He shook his head. “You accommodate each other, because the ways you both need to be loved, that changes, too, over time. If you’re lucky, it just gets stronger. Deeper.”

“Better,” Jamey contributed.

“As good as it was, it’s better now. And there’s no reason to think it won’t get even better in the future. You gotta work at it, yeah, but part of it has to do with never running out of things you want to say to each other. Things you can’t say to anybody else, and don’t want to. You don’t
have
to, do you see what I mean? Because she’s there.” He watched her pace and mutter, rake her hair back, ask Nicky something, start pacing again. “I’ve never seen her do this, for instance. She doesn’t take the central role in a Circle.”

“
Dux femina facti,
” Jamey murmured. “ ‘The leader of the enterprise a woman.’ Do you ever participate?”

He gave a reminiscent chuckle. “Ask Holly sometime to give you her notes on how to do a real old-fashioned Beltane—which is not, in fact, a high-octane fuel additive.”

“A what?”

“Sorry. There’s a game they play around here, along the lines of ‘Men are like.’ You know—men are like snowstorms, you never know when they’re coming or how many inches you’ll get. This one is ‘You may be a Redneck Witch if’—”

“A
what?”
Jamey repeated, staring.

“You may be a Redneck Witch if you think Beltane is a high-octane fuel additive. If you use an engine block for an altar. If your wand is a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“You may be a Redneck Witch—?” Jamey echoed faintly.

“—if you call the four quarters North, East, South, and that way over yonder.” Evan patted his shoulder consolingly. “You’ll get used to it.”

“You keep saying that.” But a smile ghosted across his face, and one or two of the frown lines vanished from his forehead.

Judging that he had distracted Jamey enough to ease a little of the tension, he turned once again to the pending ritual. He’d been where Jamey was right now; he knew how unlikely the whole scene looked. “This will be pretty basic. She doesn’t have a whole lot of toys to play with. If they were doing the whole big production, there’d be candles, robes, special jewelry, a cauldron, a chalice, and everybody’d have a wand. I’m not sure if it’s easier with all the goodies or harder to concentrate. All that stuff has meanings—”

“But they have to be separated out from each other, and selected for a specific association.”

“Whatever Cam told you, you were listening,” Evan approved. “For instance, Alec will be in the North, element of Earth—did you see him picking mud off his shoes? That’s all he’ll need. But he’ll have something else to use as a focus—they all will.”

“Lulah just took off her silver bracelet.”

“Did she? I was wondering what she’d use. She doesn’t usually take the West—that’s Water, by the way—she’s more comfortable in the East, where Cam’s going to be.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s Air, usually denoted by smoke.” He chuckled. “You may be a Redneck Witch if—”

“—if your incense smoke comes from a Cohiba?”

“Well, more like a Marlboro.”

CAM LIT UP, taking one wistful draw, savoring the luxuriant taste. Then he handed the cigar to Holly and tossed the lighter to Nicky. He watched his cousin go over the tokens one last time, and wished she’d just get on with it. Aware of Jamey’s presence—and his perplexity—as a twinge along every nerve, he craved the familiar procedure of ritual to quiet himself down.

At long last Holly began. Lacking a wand or athame—and having firmly turned down the suggestion of a scalpel as substitute—she had nothing more arcane than her own index finger with which to delineate the Circle. As they took their places—himself in the East, Nicky to the South, Lulah in the West, Alec as North—she went around once to cense them all with expensive cigar smoke. He might have found it funny if it hadn’t been
his
expensive cigar.

He heard Evan’s voice murmuring what he hoped were explanations, and then low laughter from both men. His muscles untwisted a bit. Jamey wasn’t completely freaking out, anyway.

Holly stood before him, edgier than someone casting a Circle ought to be. Yet it had to be her: power, real power, belonged to the four of them. Her blood would be its catalyst, and she would be its focus.

From her outstretched palm he accepted his own amber pendant, newly Blooded, and closed it tight in his left fist.

“Smoke is the prayer of Fire,” she said softly. “I summon the spirits of the wind, and entreat them to share with us their powers, that we may perceive truly.”

“So mote it be,” he replied, and the ceremonial formula had its desired effect. He felt his pulse slow down, his breathing ease.

Holly pivoted and went to the center of the Circle, balancing the smoldering stick of tobacco across a clean petri dish.

To the South was Nicky. She gave him back his own gold wedding ring; he gave her Evan’s lighter. The wick ignited without her having thumbed the flint, and Cam was suddenly reminded that calling Fire was something she could do as easily as any Witch ever born.

“Fire is the spark of life. I summon the spirits of flame, and entreat them to protect and bless us, that we may be strong.”

As she returned to the center and placed the burning lighter beside the cigar, Cam was puzzled by the appeal for protection. Oh, of course: it was Evan’s lighter, and on it was a five-pointed star.

Lulah was next, standing in the West. Holly let the silver bracelet flow into their aunt’s waiting fingers, accepting in return a sealed bottle of water, saying, “Water is the blood of every living thing. I summon the spirits of Water, and entreat them to guide us upward, toward the rain.”

She twisted the cap off, moistened her fingertips, and sprinkled a little water on the floor, careful not to douse the lighter or the Cohiba. Then she turned toward Alec in the North. A pause while she squeezed up another drop of blood, and then she opened her hand so Alec could reclaim the oval of polished green jade given her earlier. Cam smiled slightly. Other men kept everything from spare change, string, and Swiss Army knives to subway tokens, breath mints, and condoms in their pockets. Alec Singleton never left home without his collection of gemstones.

“Earth is the Mother of us all,” Holly said quietly, as Alec let fall into her hand a little clump of mud. “I summon the spirits of the stone and soil above our heads, and entreat them to let us pass.”

Holly’s range of tokens now complete, the Quarters called, the Guardians invited, Cam expected the magic fully awakened within him to respond to the other three and focus on her.

But Holly wasn’t finished, and what she did now surprised him. She knelt before the four tokens, the nearest approximation to an altar they had, and spoke a fifth time.

“The voice is the sound of the spirit within. With my voice I have summoned, and with my voice I entreat and beg. Free us from this place that entraps us. Free us from this place that imprisons us. Free us from this place that confines body and spirit. Listen!
Sgë!”

The smoke swirled upward—thicker, more pungent—as she exclaimed that final word. He had never heard it before. He knew what it meant. He felt his own tongue and lips form the word, again and again. He heard his own voice calling out, compelled from deep in his lungs and deeper in his mind. One word, in unison with her, each time she spoke it.

“
Sgë! Una′lelü′ eskiska′l‘tasï′!
” Listen! Give me the wind!

Music, it was music—it was every note in all the world, merely air, only air.

“
Sgë! Ha-nâ′gwa hatû′ngani′ga, Agalu′ga Tsûsdi′ga!”
Listen! O now you have drawn near to hearken, O Little Whirlwind!

Songs he had never heard before echoed all around him, familiar as his own heart pulsing blood in primal rhythm through his veins.