The Witch and the Englishman (13 page)

I nodded, although I wasn’t sure how to prepare myself. I warned Ivy as well. “Inside, there is death. Are you ready?”

There was, of course, a slightly wicked gleam in her eye. Yeah, she might be trouble. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

I didn’t bother with knocking. Instead, I raised my hands, and, summoning the power that was always waiting within me—a power that swirled in and around and through me—I blew the front double doors off their hinges.

“Holy shit!” said Ivy when all the crashing finally subsided and the dust settled. “How did you—”

“
Never mind that,” I said, grabbing her hand. “C’mon.”

Chapter Twenty-four

The stench was overwhelming.

I tried to fight the vomit that rose as I searched for a light switch. No good. As my groping hands hit a switch, I let go of Ivy’s hand, turned my head and launched what I’d eaten for dinner tonight. I held myself up against the wall, as more of my dinner and probably some lunch and breakfast came up, too.

Ivy wasn’t having the same problem. As I stood, wiping my mouth, she was already moving through the house.

“Wait—” I said, holding my stomach.

“
It’s coming from the kitchen. Stay here. Let me have a look. I have a feeling I can handle this stuff better than you. I played a crime scene investigator in my last movie and there was a lot of fake gore. You should have seen the gross things that I had to do...”

Mercifully, her voice trailed off as she turned through a door that I knew led to the kitchen. Never had I smelled something so fetid. So ripe, so dead, so overwhelming.

As Ivy stepped into the kitchen, she backed up almost immediately, stumbling, gasping, holding her hands to her face. She backed into the far wall. I think she even hit her head. Then she, too, turned and vomited.

Some heroes we are,
I thought.

I had my phone in my hand before I realized it. My intent was to call the police.
When you find a body, you call the police right?
It seemed reasonable.

As I stood there in the entry hall, while Ivy, so brave, and yet, so foolish, vomited in the main hallway, I put my phone away. For now. Whoever was in there was dead. There was nothing we could do about that now. There was, however, still a chance that we could remove the entity responsible for all of this.

I took some deep breaths through my mouth, tasting vomit—but at least I wasn’t smelling the dead—I suddenly wished I had a gun, or that Samantha was with me. Or Smithy. Or Sanchez. Or the werewolf, Kingsley. Hell, I just wished I had a gun.

Ivy came back, wiping her mouth.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“
I...I don’t know. A woman. She’s been dead for a few days, my guess. Bloated—”

I held up my hand, cutting her off. “Please.”

“Calm yourself, child,” said Millicent in my head, although I could not presently see her. “We have its attention. You will need to keep your wits about yourself. Go with Ivy and prepare the spell. I will distract it.”

Be careful,
I thought. But Millicent was already gone.

I paused briefly, took in a lot of air, and forced myself to stay calm. That a horrific demon was slithering through this house somewhere, I had no doubt. Millicent would do her part, but now, it was time to do ours.

I pushed away from the wall and, still breathing through my mouth, cleared the living room floor, tossing aside the coffee table and pulling away the rug. We needed an open space for the containment spell. Ivy, who had recovered from her own shock, was by my side, helping.

“
You okay?” I said to her.

She nodded and was about to speak, when a god-awful shriek shook the house to its very foundation. Ivy’s eyes widened in terror. I had a feeling that my expression matched hers.

I took her hands. “Are you ready?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re on.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Ivy got busy.

She dug around in a pouch she had been carrying around her neck—it was an ancient leather satchel that she had found in an antique store and somehow, I knew it had been previously owned by another witch. It was old and crusted, and from within, she removed a glass vial filled with powdered ingredients. And then, more vials and jars came out of the satchel, as if it was bottomless and huge, like the proverbial magic carpetbag. Ivy used the biggest vial like a mixing bowl.

I knew there were two schools of potioncraft: there were some witches who followed spell recipes and got their ingredients decanted and mixed to a “T” and those witches who trusted their inner knowing and mixed potion spells by instinct.

Ivy was the latter type of witch—no, she did not use a spell book or any recipe. I watched her remove vials of wormwood and sulfur powder, jars of mandrake and kava kava. She added touches of this, dashes of that, and I watched in awe. Yes, she did seem to know what she was doing. But had she created an actual demonic binding potion?

Of that, I had no clue...and I could only pray that Millicent and I had recruited the right witch.

I watched as Ivy sprinkled the ingredients in what appeared to be a semicircle. She pivoted in the center as she spread the mixture, which came out as a blue powder which was strange, since none of the raw ingredients were blue. She paused in the middle and looked at her handiwork. Then she corked the vial again. She slipped it back in her pouch, and as she raised her hands and cast her gaze toward the ceiling—the lights in the house flickered...and then, went out completely.

We were plunged into complete darkness. It was the thickest darkness I had ever experienced.

“Oh, shit,” I said. The furious bellow from below seemed like it was getting closer. It seemed like it was, in fact, coming up the basement stairs to the living room.

“
It’s coming!” I said.

But Ivy wasn’t paying attention to me. She was mumbling an incantation. She spoke faster and faster, repeating words and phrases and stringing them together in exactly the order they should go, instinctively knowing what to say.

Or so I hoped.

Badly hoped.

The floor shook as the demon clawed up the stairs, its nails screeching across wood like fingernails across a chalkboard. From behind me, something exploded and crashed across the kitchen floor. That would be, I knew, the basement door.

In that moment, Millicent appeared before me. If a ghost could look out of breath, she did. Mostly, she looked alarmed. It was the first time I had seen anything but a serene expression on her face. Fighting demons tended to have that effect on witches, dead or alive.

“He’s here, child,” she said. “Is Ivy ready?”

As her answer, Ivy’s mumbling turned into a shout and she raised her hands higher and turned in a circle—as she did so, the powdered ingredients erupted into blue flames.

And then, there was light.

I gasped and shielded my eyes.

Yes, it was only a semicircle. Ivy stepped out, breathless, and looked at me.

“
Now you’re on, Allie,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-six

My heart hammering in my chest, I moved forward, standing before the flames, and facing whatever it was that was coming out of the darkness.

I knew, of course, what it was. I had seen glimpses of it, but I had never faced something like this, face to face, and out in the open.

A demon.

Millicent was behind me, giving me support and strength. I felt her own energy swim over me. Ivy was out of the burning semicircle, which flickered and roared behind me. She was behind me somewhere, too.

The house shook. The floor vibrated. The hallway walls, which glowed faintly from the blue firelight behind me, seemed to pulse. The Librarian had said that the demon possessed the house itself. And the land. He had said that it could, quite literally, come from anywhere and everywhere at once.

“Oh, shit,” said Ivy from behind me, and I could only imagine what she was thinking now. Surely she regretted her decision in joining us. Or not. The girl was kind of nuts. Of course, that could be an asset right about now.

In the hallway before us, as the walls pulsed and the floor shook, a dark mass appeared, and I nearly peed myself.

“Be strong, child,” came Millicent’s words.

I could only fake a nod and hold my bladder, and wait for what I knew was coming.

I had my arms raised before me, before I even knew what I was doing. Truth was, I really didn’t know what I was doing. Yes, I had mad psychic skills, but could I always trust them on a moment’s notice? I didn’t know. I hadn’t used them that often.

Still, I felt the energy crackle around me. In particular, it came from around my hands. I could see what others couldn’t: white flames surrounding my hands. No, they didn’t burn my hands, and they weren’t really flames. This was raw energy...and it was waiting for me to use it.

But was it of any use against a demon?

I didn’t know, but Archibald Maximus had seemed to think so...and that was good enough for me. But what he couldn’t predict was the fear that gripped me. Nor could he predict the unpredictable: the rage of a demon.

“Steady,” said Millicent. But now, her words were only background noise.

The house creaked and shook and groaned, and I heard wood crack and pop from all around. Windows even shattered. The entity truly seemed everywhere and anywhere.

Still, a darkness was forming in the hallway.

Filling the hallway.

Coming toward us.

I stepped back...and felt the heat of the ring of blue fire behind me.

“Easy, Allie,” whispered Ivy.

From the hallway, which began across the living room, appeared a black mass. It was perhaps blacker than anything I had ever seen in all my life. Blacker than a moonless night. Blacker than any shadow or creation by man. The thing was devoid of all light. It was the antithesis of light.

I heard myself say, “Oh, my God.” And I meant it.

Ivy said something, too, but I missed it. Instead, I took another step back, and nearly singed my pants leg. Heat blasted me from behind, while a living shadow moved toward me from in front.

It poured out of the hallway slowly, billowing into the big living room. It could have been a dust cloud or fog, had either been blacker than black.

The black fog coalesced, swirling slowly, and then faster and faster, until it took on the vague shape of a person. It stood, perhaps, eight feet tall.

This isn’t happening,
I thought.
No way is this happening.

“
Easy, child.” Millicent was my rock right now.

Two red eyes opened in the region of the head. They focused on me, and now I couldn’t be entirely sure that I didn’t pee myself.

“Oh, fuck,” said Ivy behind me, pretty much echoing my thoughts.

Horrific images flooded my mind. I saw death and blood and corpses. I saw torture and fire and rotting flesh. I saw scurrying rats and snakes and the fearsome eyes of an enraged demon.

The images I knew, were from
It
.

As the shadow regarded me, I heard slow footsteps, then the sound of clapping. The clapping and footsteps echoed down through the hallway, and they somehow seemed more amplified than they should have been.

As the footsteps drew closer, and the clapping resounded seemingly everywhere at once, a human figure stepped through the tall shadow, which dissipated in a puff of wispy black smoke.

The figure was, of course, the Englishman.

Billy Turner.

He continued clapping as he stepped deeper into the big living room, his features awash in blue light. “Now,
that
was a smashing entrance, was it not?”

But, of course, it sounded nothing like Billy. Gone was the English accent, replaced by something harsh and guttural and filled with mock humor.

“Billy,” I said, but I knew it was a waste to address him by his human name. There was no human expression on that contorted, stretched face. His eyes were too wide. The smile was too big. Nostrils were too flared. Eyebrows were too high. It was as if Billy Turner had been caught doing exactly what all of our mothers had warned us against: making funny faces and having them stay that way.

His eyes, I noted, didn’t move in their sockets. At least, I didn’t think they did. As he took in both me and Ivy, he turned his head slowly from side to side, rather than shifting his eyes. It was all...so...damn...weird.

He was totally and completely possessed. Of that, I was sure. Billy Turner the Englishman, the human, was long gone, and that saddened me greatly.

Billy lifted his head, and seemed to sniff the air. “Aw, I sense great fear and sadness. Music to my ears, so to speak.” He stepped deeper into the big room, and scanned the furniture that had been pushed aside, then his head swiveled, taking in the blue ring of fire.