The Hex Witch of Seldom (24 page)

He said, “Go away from me, Bobbi. Please.”

Instead, she tilted her head toward him, lifting her chin, parting her lips to kiss him. “Shane,” she whispered, her eyes half lidded, and he did not pull away from her. He was tame. He was hers. His strength was gone.

“Rhett Butler,” called Chantilly Lou Yandro sharply out of the nightfall, “don't you dare kiss that tart.” And by her side a white form bobbed in air, frantic. Faintly within her mind she heard its voice shouting at her, “Bobbi, no!”

And then she felt the touch of those immortal lips on hers, and she heard nothing but the pounding of her own heart. And she was hot, and full, and strong, strong with a woman's witchery, strong as any twelve virgins, strong as Chantilly because Shane was hers. She felt the hot rush in her breasts move down. She felt her lips move, her body move, felt Shane's mouth and body answer, and she knew that soon, as soon as she could lead him away to a private place, he would be all hers, heart and body and soul.

“Rhett!” Chantilly shrilled, aghast, and Bobbi broke the kiss and turned on her.

“He is Shane,” she averred to her mother, “and he is mine.”

“Call him what you like,” said another voice harshly out of the darkness, “he will not be yours.” A deep, iron-hard voice. A black form, soot-black, shadow-black, standing in the night. Sweep of black robes. “He is Shane,” the necromancer said, Samuel Bissel said, “and he is Rhett Butler, and Paladin, the wandering black knight, and he is the tavern prince, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, and many others. And he is mine.”

Chapter Eighteen

As if he had flown down out of the dark heart of the moon, the trickster stood tall on the stone atop the hill. In his primal form he stood, robed in darkness, tall and looming on that high, holy place.

Frightened, Bobbi looked to the beautiful man standing at her side. But he seemed somehow weakened, shaken, unable to move, as if some invincible power held him prisoner. Feeling her glance, he said to her in an unsteady whisper, “The trickster holds the rock.”

Bobbi looked at Bissel. Power even greater than his own flowed into the smith like suckle from the pap of earth, faintly haloing his head, his beard, his glinting eyes with a milky white glow. Bobbi could sense it more than see it, but she never doubted power was there. Under Bissel's feet the spirals and circles and meandering lines of ancient petroglyphs showed on the rock, glowing the same milky star-faint white in the moonlight, their meaning as inscrutable as that of the cuneiform scar on Shane's neck.

Shane whispered, “He—he has put his grip on me. Steel, plus—stone.…”

Kabilde lay at a small distance. Bobbi ran, three hasty strides, crouched and grasped it. But the staff lay inert, nothing but wood, in her hand.

“You've broken it, youngster!” And Bissel laughed loudly, laughter that pealed steel-hard, like hammer on anvil.

“Kabilde,” Bobbi whispered urgently to the staff, “wake up!”

No rousing of the carved serpent answered her, no blaze of white light. Bobbi felt remorse squeeze her heart, aching worse than fear. Kabilde had spent itself and spent itself to aid her, feeding her, defending her, giving her a horse of air to ride—and she had flung it aside. She had hurt Kabilde, maybe even—maybe even killed it.… Crouching on the damp ground with the staff in her hands, she let her stare flicker away from Bissel a moment; she looked down at Kabilde, checking with eyes and hands—no, the carved snake was intact, the wood not split anywhere, the small head not broken away.

“Kabilde,” she begged the staff, “I know you don't think much of me right now, but I'm not asking you to help me. Shane's in danger!”

Kabilde did not stir. Bissel laughed again.

“The dark rider is mine!” His triumphant voice echoed like clanging metal in the night. “You can do nothing to prevent it, young sorceress.”

The words brought Bobbi to her feet. “No,” she said fiercely, “He is mine! Go away, sooty old man.” And to the world at large and in particular to the inert staff on the ground she declared, “Very well, I'll fight him myself.”

She saw the glint of the necromancer's grin; it enraged her. But before he could laugh at her again, Shane's quiet, vibrant voice took hold of the night. “You are both wrong,” said the dark rider. “I do not belong to you or anyone. I am my own. I am—a free thing, a roaming thing.…”

Bissel shifted his glance to Shane, and Shane's voice started to struggle, and then words came out of him as if against his own will.

“I was—I was a free thing, running, wandering. Then they trapped me, and roped me, and threw me down, and burned the brand on my neck …” His voice faltered and faded away.

“I claim you by that brand,” said Bissel.

Only Grandpap could truly claim him by that brand, Bobbi thought hazily, and he would geld him. But no, Shane was a man now, and they didn't castrate men … or did they? What did Bissel want to do with Shane?

“Why?” she demanded of the Amishman, aloud and strongly. “What do you want him for?” But even as she spoke the words, she knew the answer.

“Power,” said the smith simply. “The dark rider will give me power as of wild horses. He will add his magic to mine.”

Even though they came from the trickster, the words were true, stone true, and to the marrow of her bones Bobbi knew it. And the truth, the truth she knew in her heart, enraged her more than any lie would have. “In a pig's eye!” she shouted, with more force than eloquence, and she charged.

His gaze, still on Shane, jerked around to her. He stood, looming and still—for a moment she thought that her sudden attack had startled him so badly she would reach him. Then she saw his naked upper lip twitch over his glinting teeth, and she knew that, contemptuously, he was waiting for her.

Her hands clawed toward him, darting at his hateful face—and he twitched his hand a little, one finger, and as if she had hit a giant fist of air Bobbi fell back onto the ground.

Her own anger pulled her back to her feet—her fury, rather, and she focused all the force of it on Bissel through her mind, her glare, as she had focused her stare on an unlocked door and on a powwow staff—doorknob and staff had knuckled under, but Bissel seemed not to care. Perhaps only good-hearted things cared. The black-hearted trickster grinned, lifted his finger, and knocked her down again, harder.

And again, and again, each time she struggled up, and she was no longer a fury, but a dogged fighter, punch-drunk, reeling, and a small voice inside her mind, perhaps her own, certainly a Yandro voice, said to her, “Even a mule don't need to be run over by a truck before it takes a think, Bobbi.” And Bissel, growing bored and annoyed, knocked her down with the whole force of his sorcerous hand, so hard that Bobbi lay on her back with the breath knocked out of her and her hands clawing at the air in front of her face.

A red glow of his own fury had started around Samuel Bissel's head. “Begone, girl-child!” he commanded.

Bobbi scarcely heard him, for her entire groggy-minded attention was taken up by the sight of her own hands in front of her. They were bent, and crooked, the hands of an old woman, and against the trickster's dull red nimbus they were the same sooty-dark color as his robes. A trick of the nighttime light, perhaps … But no, it was the cloth of her gloves, the fleece and fine calfskin of her cuffs, charcoal black.…

Bobbi had seen such moon-curved hands and fur cuffs before. White, she thought hazily, they are supposed to be white. And too beaten to fear the utter strangeness of what was happening, she knew she was seeing herself, the form behind her own form, and it was that of the sorceress. But how had she gone dark?

She had gone—the same shade as the necromancer, just the same.

“Begone!” Bissel roared. “The black rider is mine, youngster!”

“No,” she muttered, but a squeezing feeling around her heart kept her from shouting it aloud. She and Bissel, both dark in sorcery? Bissel wanted to possess Shane—just as she, Bobbi, wanted to possess him. Bissel craved something and thought the dark rider could give it to him—just as she wanted something from him. Even the things they wanted were much the same, if she let her mind think truth.…

She sat up. It was a struggle even to sit up. She hoped that if she did not stand up, Bissel would not strike her down again until he had heard her words.

And she told the trickster fiercely, “Shane will be free. The dark rider, by whatever name you call him, will be free. I vow it.”

And not far from her side, as if waking from sleep, the sensate staff Kabilde flared into white light.

Bobbi smiled. “Kabilde and I vow it,” she amended. And she stretched out her hand for the pow-wow cane, and her gloved hand, the sorceress hand hers and not hers, was white, the fleece and leather of her sleeve white as moonlight. And she stood on her feet again, the hazelwood staff in her grip, and she felt strong again, all her aches gone, her mind clear and fierce.

Still standing in his place, Shane turned his head with an effort and looked at her. She could feel more than see the blue fire in him, smothered, struggling, but still there, like embers under ashes.

“Bobbi,” said Shane. He was not the sort of man to say much, but that one word told most of it. And she did not mind that he could not help her. It was her fight.

The necromancer Samuel Bissel stroked his dark death wand with one hand, and it changed into a hammer with a head that glowed red. He raised it.

It was showdown time.

Kabilde's white fire clashed with the death-wand's red glow, and black night pressed down all around, and there would be a combat, a duel, between staff and staff, between the trickster and whatever power she, Bobbi, could call to her aid. No more trifling now from her enemy. No more finger-taps. And in a way Bobbi was terrified, but in another, bone-deep, rock-deep way she was oddly calm. Black-hearted greed's name was Bissel, for the time, and greed was her enemy. How well she knew it now.… This battle had to be.

“Aaaaaaah!” she yelled, a soldier's yell, and with staff upraised she charged as her father had once charged death in Nam.

She had to reach Bissel, had to knock him off the puissant rock … But he flicked his wrist, moving his hammer a little. Fiery spicules flew, and Bobbi stumbled back, batted away like a mosquito, a fly, the merest annoyance. Bissel twitched his hammer, tapping at air, and Bobbi felt a blow as if a club had hit her. Hammer taps now instead of finger taps, she thought with bitter amusement. I have come up a notch. Tap, tap. Rocks the size of cannonballs raining down. Tap. A tree falling on her. She kept her feet, but she staggered so that she could not set one foot ahead of the other, she could not move from her place.

In front of her, facing Bissel, Kabilde loomed up, huge, white-shining with his own wrath, terrible. Kabilde would help her—

Then the smith lifted his hammer and struck in earnest, and Bobbi fell, whacked down like a gnat, and beside her on the ground Kabilde coiled, writhing in an agony like her own. And everything went black—she could not see for pain. Or, no, the staff's white light had—gone out.…

“Bobbi.” The voice of the serpent came to her, taut and faint but still dry as smoke, smooth as glass, through the blackness. “I—can't do—any more. The sword. Draw the sword.”

“Kabilde,” she whispered, wanting to say, I am sorry, wanting to say, Don't hold it against me, what I did—though she knew by then that the staff had not held it against her, had not sulked, had helped her for all it was worth—and there was not time to say anything. The whispered word had to say it all.

“I am—spent. I can't fight. Take the sword.”

Her hand felt the crystal globe in the night, still warm from combat. She had not reached for it; it seemed to have presented itself to her grip. She pulled out the sword with a long, smoky sound, smooth and dry as Kabilde's voice. The blade, long and narrow and mirror-bright, glinting in the moonlight. She could see it, she could feel the globe in her hand, she felt new strength. Sword lifted skyward, she struggled up from the ground, stood spraddlelegged, like a gunfighter, weaving only a little.

A sound loud as clashing iron rang out in the night. Bissel was laughing at her, shouting with laughter.

Let him laugh, she thought, resting the bright blade of the sword lightly against her left hand, holding the warm grip, warm as a friend's glance, in her right. Let him laugh. It gives me time to catch my breath.

The trickster himself could scarcely breathe for laughing. She could see him dimly by moonlight and the light of the stone. Bissel, a dark form bent over by his own glee, straightening himself with an effort. “You foolish upstart!” he exclaimed when he could speak. “I was with Laertes, wielding the poisoned rapier against Hamlet. I have known swordsmen! I have fought D'Artagnan, Sir Percy Blakeney, Zorro; and you think that you, a mucking farm girl, can come against me with a sword? A pitchfork would make you a worthier weapon!”

“I hacked a copperhead apart with a hoe, once,” she retorted grimly, and she attacked him.

She caught him off guard. If it hadn't been that she did, indeed, swing the sword like a hoe, she might have drawn his blood. As it was, the shining sword blade caught the light of the new moon and sent it scudding across his startled face, wide-eyed above his beard; then the hammer head shone just as mirror-bright, then flamed. Bobbi felt the blast lift her and fling her down, and the world was black as old blood.

Through her red-dark pain she heard a frightened voice. “Oh, my,” it drawled. “Was that Yankee fire?”

Her mother.

Anger blazed up in Bobbi and sent her staggering to her feet. She hardened the muscles of her face, narrowing her eyes, and then she could see Chantilly standing nearby, her face flower-pale in the moonlight. Her mother, her own beautiful, loony, useless mother, who would probably watch her die and say, “Oh!” Her mother who did not know her, who called her Melly. Her mother who had never—