The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) (28 page)

Dark Fire.

The small wall-clock by Amber’s bookshelf was ticking away the seconds and outside the sounds the night had been replaced with an eerie, dead silence. It was as if the very world itself had been quietened, shocked by the atrocity that had been committed just next door. But the worst part was the smell of charred wood, singed earth and… burnt flesh. Damien tried to tune it out, but the smell had embedded itself into his nostrils; a sick, deathly smell.

“There was nothing we could have done,” Damien finally said.

Aaron didn’t look up. Frank didn’t move either.

“The magick surrounding that house was strong; stronger than you, stronger than all of us.”

“I couldn’t get near it,” Aaron said in a low voice. “The fire was…”

“Alive,” Frank said, picking up Aaron’s sentence and finishing it like a relay runner. “I know. The Dark Fire isn’t a fire at all. It’s a beast, and one normal humans can’t see. They just see it as a normal fire.”

Damien nodded, remembering all too clearly his last encounter with the Dark Fire at the hands of his uncle. It had nearly killed Natalie, his ex-girlfriend, but he had managed to save her life and had thought that chapter of his history closed. But here it was again, calling out from the recesses of the past, like the serial killer in the movies that refuses to die.

Or it seems to die but then gets back up at the end for one last hurrah.

Aaron stood up, suddenly. “We find whoever is responsible for this,” he said.

Frank stood too. He went to touch Aaron’s shoulder, but Aaron jerked away from him. “Listen,” Frank said, “I want to go after them too, but we need to be careful right now. Do you really think the person who started the fire left breadcrumbs for us to follow? Do you think they were that stupid?”

Aaron swallowed. Damien also got to his feet, tugged on his shirt to stretch it out, and walked to the window. Outside, the flashing lights of Fire Engine 3 were still going silently. The fire had been put out, but the men had started to dig through the rubble, searching for the cause of the fire.
It was Magick,
he wanted to say,
you won’t find anything there.
But he couldn’t say anything, so instead he watched on.

“The town is going to be on high alert,” Frank said, “So if we start skulking around, looking suspicious, we’re only going to draw attention to ourselves.”
“So, what, we’re supposed to sit here and wait?”

“I’m not saying that—”

“Then what the hell are you saying? Because I’m fucking
done
with waiting.”

Damien’s eyes went over to where Aaron and Frank were standing. Aaron’s fists were flexing, open and closed, open and closed, and his shoulders were heaving with the rhythm of his deep breaths. He wanted an answer; he wanted something to do, someone to hurt. Damien could relate to that. He had his own brand of hurt to dish out, too. Only he was better at keeping his emotions locked up inside than Aaron was, and at this moment, it was better to hold one’s cards than to act because—

“It was a message,” Damien said.

Aaron whipped around. “What?” he asked.

“That’s why they didn’t hit our house.”

“They couldn’t have hit our house even if they had wanted to,” Frank said, “Do you know how much protection this place has?”

“I don’t think they wanted to,” Damien said, “They would have known this house was protected from the Dark Fire, but that’s not the reason why they didn’t hit us. They wanted to get our attention by hurting someone else, and they waited until we were all gone to do it.”

“Wait a minute,” Aaron said, “That means they’re watching the house.”

“
Were
watching the house,” Damien said, correcting, “I doubt they would be here right now. They would know we would figure this out and go looking for them. They also know we have a werewolf with us. Their attack on the Stevenson place was planned all along.”

Aaron didn’t move. “What’s the message?” he asked.

“Don’t you see?” Frank said before Damien could speak, “We’ve protected ourselves from them, but we haven’t protected anyone else. Until now, we hadn’t even
considered
they would go for anyone else, but… we were wrong. We were so fucking wrong.”

“They went for the hamstring instead of the throat,” Aaron said.

“Huh?” Damien asked.

“Wolves always go for the vulnerable spot on their prey. Normally, that’s the throat. But when they can’t get to that they’ll go for the hamstring. Slow them down, tire them out, and kill them that way.”

Frank paced around the living room and ran his hands through his dyed white-blonde hair. “Holy shit,” he said. “Ho-ly shit!”

“What is it?” Damien asked.

“The Halloween party! That’s what the fucking message was!”

Damien’s chest tightened and Aaron’s lips pressed into a thin line, both men in agreement of what Frank had just said. It became clear what the message had been, and what the purpose for the break in communication with Amber had been about. It wasn’t to keep them from helping her; it was to keep her from finding out what was going on at home. Because the Red Witch would surely be able to throw a monkey wrench into Linezka’s unknowable agenda for Raven’s Glen; plans that included the Dark Fire and mass murder.

But that realization raised another set of alarming questions, which would nibble at the back of Damien’s mind like rats fighting over a piece of cheese. What if it had been Linezka’s plan all along for Amber to go to Berlin? And if so, why separate her from her friends now? Why not do it sooner? Part of him couldn’t believe this had anything to do with the Halloween party. There was something else here, something she knew that no one else did. The Halloween party may only have been a target of convenience, if it indeed was a target at all, but if her goal had been to throw up a smokescreen for her unknowable plan she had succeeded.

Damien Colt didn’t sleep that night. Instead, he stayed up watching that big silver plate in the night sky sail silently across the length of his window.

CHAPTER 28

The thing about demons is this: they don’t like being in the spotlight.

Once you’re on to it, it slinks back into the shadows and disappears like the feral cat you’ve just caught trying to sneak in through your doggy door for a quick snack. And, sure, it makes you wonder why it made itself known to you in the first place. But the other thing about demons is that they’re embodiments of vice, and one of the biggest vices is vanity. So they live within a constant state of contrast and conflict: one side of them wants people to feel their hands at work, while the other hides its identity with vicious passion. And once you know this about a demon it becomes easy to keep them at bay. At least for a while.

Through our combined workings of Magick, we could secure an outbound flight to London the day after the incident at the Berlin Cathedral, with a connecting flight to the US three hours after landing in the UK. It was easy enough to nudge Fate into triggering a couple of last-minute cancellations for us, but swinging it so that the flight was on the same night was a much harder thing to do.

So we waited. We ate. Slept—or didn’t. And the next day we left Luther, Helena and her witches, and Berlin behind us as we made the long journey back to American soil, back to Aaron and Damien and Frank, back to Raven’s Glen, and back to the place that existed only a stone’s-throw away from Linezka’s base of operations in Seattle. Seattle, of all places. It was still a little unbelievable, but it was also fortunate. All I had to do was keep a clear image of the skyline in my mind and try to figure out where that penthouse was in relation to the Space Needle. Then I could just show up one day, without the use of a trans-location ritual, and
blow it away
.

“Amber?” Collette asked, nudging me.

I opened my eyes and looked at her. “Hmm?” I asked.

“Are you alright? You were speaking in your sleep.”

“Oh… I wasn’t sleeping.” I might have been.

“But you… just said
blow it away
.”

“Did I? I guess I was sleeping then. Where are we?”

“Final descent into San Francisco.”

A yawn spilled out of me, and I stretched into it. “That’s awesome,” I said, “I had a feeling I’d sleep on the way home.”

Collette nodded. “I did also, I think.”

I sighed. “Aaron won’t be there to pick us up. He has no idea we’re even landing today. I hated that I couldn’t get a message out to him.”

“Don’t worry about zat,” she said, “We will make it home with time to spare.”

“Time to spare?”

Collette drew in a breath, paused, and said, “To make ze party, of course.”

For the first time since we met, I was sure Collette had just lied. Or, well, maybe it wasn’t a lie per se, but it was a hesitation. She hadn’t meant to say that we would make it home with time to spare. Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe she couldn’t find the right words—you know, what with being French and all—and had confused herself. But it didn’t feel like confusion; it felt like a hesitation. Like an omission.

I chose not to make a big deal out of it, though, and we continued on our trip until our plane touched down at SFO International.

There, we went through the usual baggage reclaim scenario, and I tried—in vain—to get through to Aaron on his cell. But Collette stopped at a courier desk and started to make arrangements to have our bags forwarded on to my home address. Before I could protest, she was grabbing our suitcases, signing paperwork, and paying the woman behind the counter. Just like that, our bags were swallowed up by the FedEx conveyor belt, not to be seen—I hoped—until later.

“Why did we just do that?” I asked, “We could’ve just gotten a rent-a-car.”

“It is 19:37. Ze drive back to Raven’s Glen would add another hour or so to our travel time, and we do not have zat luxury.”

My brows furrowed again all on their own.

“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned… time,” I said. “Are you going to tell me why you’re so concerned with time?”

She shook her head, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the ladies' toilets just by the airport main exit. It was clean, shiny, and smelt vaguely of disinfectant, but it was also empty, and I gathered that was what Collette needed. We clearly hadn’t come in here in such a hurry because she needed to pee.

I watched her head to the small window in the corner of the room and look at it. It was a narrow slit, barely large enough for you to stick your head through, and it stood at the tip-top of the wall; inches below the point where the wall became a ceiling.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She turned around, walked toward me, and took my hands. “We are going home ze express way.”

“Expre—”

The word didn’t have time to form. Darkness gathered around me with such speed it made my head spin. Collette was there, with her hands in mine, but the pitch blackness clung to her, lapping against the sides of her face and her arms until she looked almost like a two-dimensional image herself; a a half-person with eyes that shone sky blue against the dark.
“Don’t be afraid,” Collette said.

“W-what… where… what’s going on?” I asked, struggling to find the words.

“We are going home.”

“Going home? But… we’re… not moving.”

“But we are, ma cheire,” she said, smiling.

And then I understood. I remembered a moment back at the house a couple of days ago, when she had seemed to arrive as a shadow on the back of the wind. A shadow only my witch’s eyes could see. I had always wanted her to teach me how to do it, but she had said it was too dangerous to teach me more Shadow Magick. A sorceress’ power was mutable and malleable, like clay, but Shadow Magick came from a Shadow, and I—sorceress or not—didn’t have one.

My stomach started to feel like a sack of feathers. I imagined this was what astronauts must feel like when they’re up there in zero gravity, and I didn’t much care for it. The sensation made me feel queasy and ill at ease. More so than the fact that, around us, there was nothing; not even the vague impressions of a landscape rolling past us. How did she know where we were going? How were we even going anywhere? And when could I learn to do this?

Those were all questions I wanted to ask, but I chose it better not to ask them. It didn’t seem right to speak in this null-space we were in. It almost felt like a library, where one has to keep quiet all the time so as not to upset the order of things. But before I could finish the thought, Collette smiled, spun me around, and pointed over my shoulder to the spot of light in the dark.

“Walk towards it,” she said, “I’m right here.”

And I did, slowly at first, accelerating into a normal walking pace when I found my confidence. Suddenly, we were in the real world again, with autumn rustling around us, leaves and twigs caught in an updraft and into the sky. Our house stood before us, as was my car safely tucked in the drive, and my sycamore tree swaying gently with the breeze.

But my heart didn’t soar at the sight because my eyes stole to the Stevenson house; or at least, what remained of it.