Trio of Sorcery (15 page)

The moment she did so, she sensed that little door
opening up in her again. The movement of power was slower and more deliberate, but it was obvious that she was finally on the right track, or it wouldn't have come at all.

Once her circle and wards were in place, she sat down cross-legged in the middle of the circle and cut the crotch out of the pan ties with a silver knife. Not her
atheme;
that was reserved for other things, and she didn't want to contaminate its potential power with anything of Tamara's.

She pulled several threads from the scrap of cloth, then disassembled her compass.

It looked like an ordinary compass; a glass cover, the needle resting delicately on a spindle, and the base. But there was no compass rose painted on the base; it was just a blank piece of white stuff. Ivory, though the elephant that had left that tusk had died of natural causes long before there was any ban on importation.

Everything but the lid was ivory, in fact, including the needle. The lid was a glass disk set in bronze. It was very, very old. Di wasn't sure how old, but the ivory had mellowed to a creamy shade.

She opened the bottle of rubber cement and lifted the needle from its place. She delicately dabbed a line of the adhesive on the needle, carefully laid three of the threads from Tamara's pan ties along it, then set the needle back on the spindle. She finished reassembling the compass, then changed position from cross-legged to kneeling, facing south, the direction of the Protector and Avenger,
who could take many names, but answered as often to Archangel Michael as any.

She closed her eyes and clasped her hands over her
atheme,
holding it point down above the compass. She took in a long breath, threw everything out of her mind except the need to find Tamara's power, and released her own power through her knife into the compass.

When she opened her eyes and looked, the needle was pointing between west and south.

“Right,” she said, realizing from the looks on their faces that there had probably been a physical manifestation of that discharge of power. “Now we have a guide. Saddle up and move out.”

Zaak, Em, and Emory somehow squeezed into the back of the Mini Cooper, though Em was mostly on Emory's lap. Di and Marshal were in the front, following, as best they could, given the roads, the guidance of the compass. The streets around Cambridge were not exactly laid out in a logical fashion.

Still, that was the least of their worries. Once they actually got close to Tamara's power, the shields would begin to interfere with the compass. Eventually the needle would start to spin. Diana could only hope that the area they ended up in was something like warehouses—places without a lot of people in them. They certainly couldn't
call the cops and start a house-to-house search in a crowded residential neighborhood on the basis of three underwear threads glued to a compass needle.

But the needle continued to point steadfastly in one direction, and they moved out of the city into the suburbs, and then out of the suburbs of Cambridge into the suburbs of Boston, past Boston College—

“We are way out of Cambridge jurisdiction,” Emory said from the backseat, sounding muffled.

It was getting darker now, the sun going down, dusk closing in. That was both good and bad. Good, because it meant if they actually found the right place, they could sneak up on it without Tamara seeing them. Bad, because Tamara was clearly working some bad juju, and evil things were stronger when the sun went down.

By the time there was nothing left of the sun but some red streaks in the sky, they were out in rural Massachusetts. Farm country, lots of woodland and orchards. The lights, slowly coming on as darkness fell, were few and far between. Diana's hopes rose a little.

They turned down a barely paved two-lane road and traveled about two miles along it without seeing any lights at all other than their own headlights. Orchards? The trees were spaced too regularly to be woods, but if these were orchards they were long abandoned. Di felt in her kit for her flashlight and trained the yellow beam on the compass. Her timing was good, because moments later, the needle began to spin wildly.

“Ha!” she said, and Marshal glanced over at her, taking his foot off the gas—not that the car was going all that fast.

“Keep going,” she told him. “It's around here somewhere, but I want to mark where the—”

“Where the effect ends.” He stopped the car anyway and zeroed the odometer. “Now we know where it begins.”

She shook her head ruefully. “I think you're smarter than I am.”

“Naw. I was an Eagle Scout.” He made a face. “Don't look at me in that tone of voice.”

“I was just imagining you in short pants.” That broke the tension a little as Em giggled and Emory guffawed. “Carry on, Scoutmaster.”

Marshal growled something unintelligible and sent the car creeping forward again. It seemed forever before the needle stopped spinning and pointed back the way they had come.

“Stop,” she said, and Marshal peered at the odometer.

“One point two five miles to the midpoint,” he said, “roughly.” He maneuvered the car carefully in an effort not to get off the pavement, taking so long to get going in the opposite direction that Emory made the impatient suggestion that they just get out, pick up the car, and turn it around.

Finally they were underway again.

“Stop us a little short and look for some place we
can pull the car off the road where no one is going to notice it.”

“You're asking me to pull this poor little thing off the road?” The car bumped and lurched around a pothole. “Lady, the springs in ballpoint pens are stronger than the ones in my car!”

“Just—
there!”
She pointed ahead, at what looked like an overgrown gravel road intersecting with the rough lane they were on. Obediently, Marshal eased onto the track, which was a lot better than it looked; hardpacked dirt nearly as good as pavement—the weeds growing over it gave no resistance. They passed the nearly invisible remains of an old, crumbled fence. Once they were under the trees and away from the reach of the headlights of any car on the road, it would be hard to tell they were there.

They all got out. Diana distributed flashlights to the others, who played them on the ground, revealing a litter of cigarette butts and crumpled packages, beer cans, food wrappers, and a couple of empty bottles of harder stuff mixed in with the weeds.

“Well, that explains a lot,” said Emory.

“Good thing it's Sunday night, otherwise we'd have company.” Marshal got the rest of their gear out of the car's tiny boot, and looked at Di. “All right, Fearless Leader, what are we looking for?”

“Bonehead,” she said affectionately. “Since there's no Haunted Amusement Park around here, it has to be the
Abandoned Farmhouse. Don't you ever watch any Saturday morning cartoons?” Marshal shook his head sadly. “No wonder the only culture you have is the stuff growing in your fridge.”

“You know, Abandoned Farmhouse is also something that turns up in Cthulhu Mythos stories,” Emory said soberly. “Ah…we aren't going to need any Elder Signs, are we?”

“Was that supposed to be a joke?” Zaak asked.

“No,” Emory replied. “This is New England, and I bet not everything Lovecraft wrote about was something he made up.”

That was just a hair too close to the truth. Di shivered, and not from the cold, though it was icy out here, and the darkness wasn't helping. “Let's get going,” she said, wincing at the sound of her own voice. It sounded too loud. Instinctively, she wanted to whisper.

She led the way back to the road, then turned off her flashlight; the others did the same, though she could sense their uncertainty. “Wait for the moon,” she told them. “It's almost full, and it should be coming up in a second. Em, Emory, you guys got your weapons?”

“Yep. We want to know where the rest of
you
are before we start going all Dirty Harry, though.” Emory's voice sounded subdued. “How do we do that?”

“You all stick together; you've seen enough horror movies to know not to lose each other in the dark. If you do, those of you who are still together stop and let the
stray find you. If I have to split off, I'll yell before I come anywhere near you.”

“Got it.” The moon was rising above the trees now, and as she expected, it flooded the road with light. With their eyes adjusted they could see reasonably well, enough to keep from spraining an ankle in a pothole or falling over a rock. They made their way cautiously down the road. It was…spooky. Far off in the distance it was possible to hear the sounds of cars and trucks on the highway, but nearby? Only the occasional noise of an animal scuttling through the dead vegetation, or farther off, the noise of something larger moving away from them.

“This really is going to be a haunted farmhouse, isn't it?” Emory said quietly.

“Well, it's pretty likely Tamara has holed up in the farmhouse that this orchard belongs to,” Di replied. “Or at least something like that. I'd have suspected an old trailer home, but what I saw in my dream looked older and more permanent than that. I can't see her camping.”

“Me either, not after that bedroom. I don't see anyone with that many wigs knowing how to rough it.” Marshal peered up the road. “I think that might be what we're looking for, on the left. See where there's no drop-off at the edge of the pavement, like there is everywhere else? Like there used to be an access road there, or maybe a driveway.”

They picked up their pace a little—as much as anyone wanted to, given the dim light. Sure enough, there was
something like an overgrown track there. There was no sign of a gate, but Marshal and Di evidently had the same idea at the same time, for they both went straight up to what looked like an impenetrable barrier of bushes and weeds and discovered that the barrier was just a screen of dead stuff piled up to hide the road.

“Bingo.” Di shivered again. “Either we have a mean old man out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, someone farming weed, or Tamara. So wait—”

She closed her eyes and tried to see if she could sense anything.

Nothing but a vague but powerful feeling of menace.

“Anything on the radar?” Zaak asked. She shook her head.

“Sometimes these access roads go for half a mile,” Marshal observed. “We might be too far away. Can we use the flashlights?”

“I think we're going to have to,” she replied. “But…be careful, because that's just going to advertise we're coming….”

“Like falling and breaking an ankle wouldn't?” Em put in. “Still, it might be worth it for someone to scout ahead of the group.”

“That'd be me,” Marshal replied. “Eagle Scout, remember? I won't go farther ahead than twenty yards. When I know that stretch is clear, I'll whistle a little, and you can catch up to me and then I'll go ahead again.”

The sense of urgency that had driven Di out here ar
gued against such caution, but the rest of her was in complete agreement. So that was what they did; the group huddled together, listening to the faint crackle of weeds being trampled underfoot as Marshal forged ahead. Then, at his excellent imitation of a whip-poor-will, they moved forward to his position, then waited for him again as he went ahead.

That continued for a while—it seemed like a very long time, but was actually a lot less than an hour—right up to the point where, instead of hearing his whistle, they heard him furtively making his way back to them.

“There's a farmhouse there, all right. Some lights at the rear, not many and not bright, and it looks like most of the windows are boarded up, so it's not as if someone is living there who has a right to be there. I think.” He was whispering, and they all kept their voices just as low. “Di, you getting anything now?”

“This doesn't exactly work like radar,” she whispered back, but she couldn't deny the heavy feeling of menace all around. “All right. We need a plan. Does that place look like it has a basement? Maybe a root cellar or something? And do you feel comfortable prowling around it a little? If not—”

“I'm comfortable, providing no werewolves jump me.” He tried to make a joke out of it.

“I can try to do something to keep that from happening,” she said quite seriously. “I can make you invisible to supernatural things, but so far as you making perfectly
ordinary noises and alerting killer German Shepherds or anything like that—”

He sobered. “If you can do that, I'll take my chances. I was pretty good at teenage sneaking around.”

She nodded, thought about exactly what they needed to know, and said, “All right. We just need to know the general layout of the place and where the doors and accessible windows are. And if there is a basement with outside access.” Right now a basement room was the likeliest match for the room she had seen in her dream.

“Hiding” Marshal was magic she could do quickly; she'd done it a thousand times, although usually on herself. The process simply made the person in question blend in with the background, chameleonlike, at least to the senses of anything magical. Not so much invisibility, as making the eyes slide away, a forceful “not noticing.” It wouldn't last long, but it didn't have to.