The three male Sirens haven’t been idle while I’ve wrought destruction on their sisters. One is already heading my way, a wicked, long black sword grasped in his right hand, his steps powerful and confident. The other two are focused on their human prizes, which are like senseless flies about to carom into a web.
Clang!
The first swing is like a hammer blow, but I block it and reduce the impact by twisting away, letting the Siren’s sword push through mine and into the dirt, throwing him off balance. One of Mr. Jackson’s tricks. I take advantage of my opponent’s surprise and kick him hard in the face, throwing him back. His sword, carried by the momentum of his strike, remains stuck in the ground, springing back and forth like a pendulum.
Like Zorro, I slash three times, carving up his chest. A mask of pain contorting his expression, he somehow runs off, retreating into the giant yellow flowers which will silently bear witness to his death.
Winded but still alive, my eyes flick back to the remaining male Sirens. One, a steroidal bruiser, brutalizes one of the women, punching and kicking her with something close to joy. Her head snaps back with a particularly vicious blow, and I see a glint of light rebound off the Siren’s knuckles. My mind processes the information without emotion. He’s wearing brass knuckles. He likes to hurt women. He likes to do it up close and personal. He’s a sadist.
I’m about to snap off a throwing star to end his vendetta against the farmer women, when I spot the third male Siren, his narrow eyes of Asian descent. He aims his bow at me and for a moment I freeze, caught down the shaft of his arrow.
At the last second I dive and the arrow whizzes over my head, too close, too freaking close.
I look up and he’s already got another one nocked. Rolling hard to the right, gruesomely aware of the blood and ichor soaking into my clothes, I scramble to my feet just as he lets the next arrow fly. I juke right, as if the arrow’s the only thing keeping me from scoring a touchdown, but I’m a hair too slow, and the arrow grazes my left shoulder, tearing my skin and shooting lightning bolts of pain through my nerves. My breath leaves my lungs with a sharp whoosh! and my left hand has the sudden urge to open and drop my sword.
But before it can, I grab the hilt with my right hand and stare at my attacker, who’s staring at me down the length of yet another arrow. Perhaps the final one. He shoots and I feel a surge of energy in my chest, and then everything seems to slow down, like I’ve pressed some magical slo-mo button on the remote control of life.
Although it’s stupid and makes no sense, I raise a hand as if to catch the arrow, which I can see spinning toward me. And then, although it’s impossible, the arrow seems to turn in midair as the whole world speeds up to normal again.
The Asian Siren tries to duck his head but he’s too slow. The arrow rips through his face, getting stuck deep in his bones. His own arrow has become a skewer and his head’s the hunk of meat. His bow drops next to his body on the cracked earth.
Laney strides from the sunflower field, just behind his corpse.
“Eat lead you pansy-ass warlock!” she says, with the gusto of a dough-spinning pizza chef announcing “Extra cheese!” She raises her shotgun, but then drops the barrel as she realizes I’ve already taken out her target.
The last Siren, the meathead, climbs off of the woman he’s astride, dodging the final human woman as she attempts to—I think—hug him, and stalks toward Laney.
Chook-chook.
She raises the shotgun again, even as the Siren raises his hand.
She takes aim. I wait for the blast but it never comes because Laney has dropped her shotgun. There’s electricity in the air and I know the Siren is working his magic, drawing her to him, her legs moving forward. Her desire is only to be as close to the Siren as possible.
“No!” I shout, rushing forward as the Siren extracts a knife from a pocket and slashes at Laney. Leaping, I stab my sword frantically at his gut, hoping—praying—I’m not too late.
I collide with the Siren, who rocks back, stumbles, his knife slash just missing Laney’s throat, but somehow uses his tree-trunk legs to maintain his balance. He turns his head to look at me, his lips a blood-red grin.
Laney is practically on top of him, and he lifts his knife hand once more. I throw myself in front of her, prepared to block his blow with my own body if I have to, but then—
The Siren pitches forward, barreling into Laney before I can block her, the knife coming down with a stomach-curling thunk! He lands directly on her, his knife hand thrust down, but it’s over so fast that she doesn’t cry out, doesn’t so much as utter a gasp of pain.
It’s over and I’ve failed.
Clutching my shoulder, I look over at Laney’s collapsed form, the pain and sorrow tugging moisture from my eyes and blurring her body. Her head lifts up and I gasp. “You okay, Carter?” she says.
I have no words. There’s death all around me, but not her. Not Laney. Thank God. I stumble forward and kneel down and ask her, “Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head. “Just my pride, a little. The Siren’s Call vanished so I thought I could help.”
“They were distracted when I was fighting them,” I say, still in shock that the knife somehow missed Laney and sliced directly into the ground next to her. I lift a hand to
(Touch her hair?)
(Rub her cheek?)
Before I can decide my purpose, she grabs my hand and uses my weight to pull herself to her feet, recollecting her shotgun. “Thanks,” she says.
“Help!” a high-pitched female voice screeches before I can respond. Laney and I look at each other, then at the mound that is the dead mountain-like Siren. “Help me!” the voice squawks again.
Laney and I reach her at the same time and work together to roll the Siren off of her. I grit my teeth at the torturous pain that lances through my shoulder and arm, but don’t cry out.
A scared, disoriented old woman with a sandy complexion and gray eyes stares up at us. Vines of greasy gray-white hair hang around her face. “Leave me alone!” she shouts. “Murderers, rapists! Help! Help!”
“It’s okay, ma’am,” Laney says, her voice low and calm. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Where’s my husband? What have you done with Jim-Bob?”
Laney gives me a look that says Jim-Bob? Really? but she says, “Let’s get you somewhere safe.”
“First I need to find Jim-Bob,” she moans.
Two horrific images flash in my mind, thankfully in black and white: a man dying with a sword in his chest and blood in his mouth, stifling the last noise he’d ever make in this life; and a headless corpse collapsing, its head tumbling past me.
Acid roils in my stomach, rises up. I turn to the side and hurl in the dirt.
“Ma’am,” Laney says, keeping remarkably calm. Spitting the foul taste from my mouth, my respect for her goes up another two or three notches. “Jim-Bob didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
“What?” I don’t look at her face, but I feel the horror and shock in her tone. “My Jimmy? What—what happened?”
“The witches got him, ma’am.”
“No…No. And Mary and Tom?” Finally I look at her, using a small patch of non-bloody fabric on my shirt to wipe my mouth. Glistening tears are pooling in her eyes, which aren’t gray at all, but as blue as a clear mountain spring on a summer day.
Laney shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”
The woman weeps into her hands, and I bite my lip until it bleeds.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The old woman fell asleep as soon as we got to her farm, emotionally and physically drained.
I saved her and I saved Laney. Finally. Before now, I was wondering whether the limit to my skill was saving myself.
But what was that weird slowing-down-time thing? And the arrow turning in midair and impaling the Siren? Was it some glitch in the warlock’s magic? Or was it simply my adrenaline making everything distorted? I’ve got no time to think about all that though, as we’ve got
a very distraught woman here to think about.
After we collected Trish and Hex, the heartbroken and defeated woman managed to lead us to her farmhouse. I carried her thin, frail body the whole way, while she directed me in monotone emotionless whispers.
I have to admit, they have a pretty smart setup, which is what kept them alive for so long. They’d abandoned the farmhouse, leaving it with broken windows and a smashed-open door, making it appear as if whoever had lived here was long gone and that the place had been picked clean of anything of value. Instead, the four of them had been living in the big red barn a little ways off. Around the outside of the barn, they’ve scattered dead horse and cow carcasses, which are now half-rotted. An animal graveyard to ward off any humans who might happen upon their farm. And an indication to any passing witches that the occupants of the farm have already been killed, along with their animals. Pretty smart.
And yet, not enough to fight the Sirens, an enemy they couldn’t even see, as an invisible force swept over them, turned their own legs against them, and pulled them out of hiding, across their farm, and into the sunflower fields. And now three out of the four of them are dead.
I feel my hands start to tremble at the thought of three dead people, but I don’t let them, squeezing them into fists. Because I can’t have any regrets when I saved one of them. And I killed a whole lot of evil in the process.
“You okay?” Laney’s voice cuts through the thick, wheaty barn air. She steps into a beam of dust-mote-filled late-morning sunlight that shines through a window high above us. Her gaze flicks to my fisted hands and I unclench them.
Pretending I don’t hear her question, I say, “Did you find anything of value?”
“Some food, some water. We’ll take only what we need—as payment for saving her life.”
I’m about to say that life-saving isn’t a paid gig, but she cuts me off. “Oh! And I almost forgot. They have an arsenal, too. All kinds of guns and plenty of ammunition. I think we’ve got all the weapons we can carry, but I restocked on shotgun shells. Can never have enough of those.” The way her eyes light up when talking about guns and ammo makes me want to laugh but I’m still in too much pain.
“Good. Is the woman still sleeping?”
“Yeah. Trish and Hex, too. We need to do something about that wound, by the way.”
I glance at my left shoulder, which is covered by a blood-soaked t-shirt that I wrapped around it to slow the bleeding and hide the injury. The ache and zinging pain comes back in a dizzying second. “Call an ambulance,” I say. “The cops, too,” I add. “I’d like to report a crime.”
Laney looks like she wants to laugh, her cheeks lifting slightly, but she doesn’t and I don’t blame her. I can’t laugh either right now. “Today I’m the ambulance. And the cops. Vigilante justice and backyard surgery.”
“What are my chances, doc?” I say.
“Good if you let me see the wound.”
So far I’ve refused to let her examine me, for no reason other than I’m afraid of what a hardened girl like her might do. “Maybe later,” I say.
Two beats pass. “Okay, it’s later,” she says. “Pull up some hay and lie down.”
I’m so close to smiling…but no. Not yet. Not with three dead farmers nearby. Someone’s husband, someone’s wife. Fathers? Mothers? Brothers? Sisters? Friends? Lives ended at the hands of witches, for seemingly no reason other than being human.
Humans killed witches for no reason other than them being witches, Mr. Jackson had said. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’d do the same to us.
That doesn’t make it right, I’d argued.
That doesn’t make it wrong, either, Mr. Jackson had said. I’d refused to speak to him the rest of the day after that.
The glaze vanishes from my eyes when Laney says, “Now let me see that shoulder.”
I cringe, but lay back on the hay-covered ground, grimacing slightly at the impact.
Laney pulls out a knife. “Hey, that’s not one of Huckle’s knives is it?” I ask, imagining being cursed for life because of Tillman’s parting gift.
“What do you think I am, stupid?”
Guess not. I close my eyes and try to relax as I feel her cutting my shirt away. My shoulder throbs with each push and pull.
I open my eyes to find my skin bare. “Whoa!” she says. “Nice six pack.”
“Mr. Jackson didn’t hold back,” I say. Your body is your most important weapon.
“We’ll burn your shirt,” Laney says, tossing it aside. “No amount of washing will scrub all the blood off of it.”
“Don’t you think wearing a bloodstained ripped shirt will make me look tougher?” I say.
“A big teddy bear like you? Nothing could make you look scary,” she says, her eyes twinkling in the light.
A sudden jolt goes through me as I remember how she mashed her lips against mine. “Laney…” I say.
“Yes, Teddy Bear,” she says.
“About before…” I let the words linger in the air, hoping she’ll figure out what I’m asking about.
“You mean before when you saved me or before when I gave you the kiss of your life.” Her eyes dance with amusement.
“It wasn’t the kiss of my li—”
“I’m just messing with you, Straight-and-Narrow. I know it meant nothing to you. Me either. Your heart still belongs to Beth.”
Her words sound so right, and yet I hate the question that pops into my head. Can your heart still belong to someone who’s dead? I desperately want the answer to be yes, but the pain I feel in my chest tells me I don’t really believe it.
And yet, I say, “It does.”
“I was just trying to get you to stay, so we could’ve avoided you getting shot with an arrow and having to care for a shell-shocked and heartbroken old woman when we should be on our way.”
I let out a deep breath and force a smile.
“You were really worried I had a thing for you? C’mon, you’re a good-looking nice guy and all—more so after seeing you without a shirt—but I don’t think either of us are in the right mind for that kind of thing. I mean, what would we do for our first date? Tonight let’s have a real treat. We could eat instant noodles and go hunt a Siren or two, honey, what do you think?”
I finally laugh, although it sends tendrils of agony down my arm, numbing my hand. “No, I was thinking we’d assassinate a dark wizard and then eat the Ramen noodles.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Laney says, pretending to get excited. “To ration, we could even share a pack and slurp at opposite ends of one of the curly noodles Lady-and-the-Tramp style, meeting in the middle. That’d be H-O-T-T hot!”
We’re both laughing now, except I’m clutching my shoulder, which feels like it’s been shot with an arrow. Oh wait.
Blood dribbles from the wound, adding a second coat to the dried crimson river already snaking down my arm.
“Does it hurt?” Laney asks, giving my other arm a hard pinch.
“Ouch!” I say. “What was that for?”
“Just trying to take your mind off of it.”
“Epic fail,” I say. “Now both arms hurt.”
“It was worth a try,” she says. And then, “Oh, God.”
I follow her gaze to my injured shoulder to see what’s caught her attention. A circle of bright green ooze has wormed its way through the hole in my shredded skin. My chest clenches.
Witch poison.
Chapter Forty
“How am I not dead?” I breathe, feeling ill all of a sudden.
“I—I don’t know,” Laney says, moving a hand toward the wound as if to touch the goo, but then pulling it away sharply. “Is that…?”
“Yeah,” I say lifelessly. “Witch poison. According to Mr. Jackson it usually kills within seconds. And yet…I’m still here.” My heart stutters at the thought that it could just stop at any moment, like a watch hand the moment the battery runs out.
“Maybe part of the arrow is lodged so tightly against muscle or bon
e or whatever that the poison can’t get into your blood stream,” Laney says.
A good theory, but… “The arrow went completely past. It didn’t break, just sliced across my skin. Plus, witch poison doesn’t need to enter the bloodstream to kill you,” I say. “You get splashed with the stuff and it’ll eat right through you. It should be burning through my skin right now.”
“But it’s not.”
“It’s not,” I agree, watching as the green ooze sizzles on my skin, forming bubbles that pop and fizz.
“We need to get the poison out,” she says.
“How?” My abs start to ache from my stomach being clenched. I try to relax them.
“Are you scared, Carter? A big, bad witch hunter like you? Listen, I’ll suck out the venom. I saw this guy do it to a snake bite on TV once.”
“I’ll pass,” I say. “Just get wet towels to clean it and see if the farm’s got any antiseptic and pain killers.”
“Okay,” Laney says, and starts to turn away.
I close my eyes.
Fire-lightning-pain-glass-spikes-agony-agony-agony-agony!
“ARGH!” I roar as my eyes snap open to find Laney scrubbing at the wound with a wet cloth, her arm muscles tight and sinewy.
Burning…burning…burning…“ARGH!”…STOP…Stop…stop…
Just as I feel another lance of mind-numbing fire plunge through my shoulder my eyes flutter shut and everything goes black.
~~~
With a jolt, I awake from the nightmare about Laney cleaning my wound. Staring at the dusty sunlight streaming above me, I take two deep breaths, hold the second, and then let it out in a rush of relief. Even Laney wouldn’t be so reckless.
I spy movement on the edge of my vision. “Laney,” I murmur.
“Welcome back,” she says. “Sorry about that. You were being a baby and didn’t give me much choice.”
“Wha-what?”
“You know, the whole getting-shot-with-an-arrow thing? It had to be cleaned eventually, and it’s not like it was going clean itself out, right?”