It was all or nothing, now.
CHAPTER 15
I strode across the street and entered the Saloon like I was born to, but as I crossed the threshold of the swinging door I found my composure sapped away in one mighty gasp. I guess I didn’t know what I expected to see, coming in to a place like this. Everyone here was dead. How much of a ruckus could they cause? But when I stepped inside, the ruckus hit me hard in the gut like a hot shot of tequila.
A piano was playing in the corner of the room by itself; a little southern ditty I didn’t recognize but one which had many of the patrons dancing. A poker game, wreathed in a mantle of cigar smoke, was taking place in the darkest corner of the Saloon; all hard faces, hats and cards. On the first floor banister a number of women in colorful dresses waved and whistled at the drunks downstairs; and they all wanted a moment or two alone with them—any of them.
I had seen student bars gloomier than this on a Friday night.
I made my way through the tangle of tables and chairs, careful not to bump into anyone, not to make eye contact, not to—
“Psst! Red!” A voice caught my attention. I stopped, turned, looked. The man was drunk off his face, was rocking weeks’ worth of untrimmed beard, a wife-beater, and stank of… Gods, I didn’t know what he stank of, but it made me want to cry. “Yeah, you,” he said, drooling over his denim jeans. “Why don’t you come on over here and give ol’ Huntley a kiss?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“C’mon. Pretty girl like you could make any man’s day. You’re prettier than any of the girls in here, you know that?”
“I’m not interested.”
“I’ll pay!” he said, wiping the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hairy hand. “I’ve got silver!”
“Again, no.”
Huntley scowled and reached for my hand. I went to twist away from him but was too slow! He grabbed me and pulled me closer to his reeking body. “Huntley don’t like being refused,” he said.
My heart jump started and kicked into high gear. My body trembled, but not out of fear. It was the Power. I stared Huntley down and his face changed color, if that was at all possible. He released me and backed away, as did two of his friends who had been watching the whole thing.
“You’re… you’re—”
A pulse of magick shot out of my chest and into his, sending him sprawling to the ground on his ass. The music and the chatter stopped. His friends looked on, wide-eyed, but neither of them said a word. Then the piano resumed, and the chatter slowly came back into being. I turned away from the men and headed toward the bar, content, but now more alert than ever.
The bar was clean and clear of filth and drunks so I found a spot and sat down. Looking over my shoulder I could see that the specter of cigar and cigarette smoke was hovering and casting a hazy mantle about the Saloon, but it was only a curtain of smoke, it seemed to have a nucleus; a central, moving wisp floating around with a kind of intelligence I couldn’t comprehend. Was the cloud a ghost too, or was it something else? The nucleus weaved in and out of the spaces between people and things, encircling them, caressing them—claiming them.
Come in, it would have said if it had a mouth to speak with, Join the party.
If that was a ghost, it was the creepiest thing I had ever laid eyes on. If it wasn’t a ghost, well, that opened up a whole other can of worms. And somehow I didn’t think I could exactly walk up to it and ask it what it was. I didn’t exactly know the etiquette around here and I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself on account of my status as one of the living.
“What can I getcha?” said the barman.
I shook my head and turned to face him. He was tall, muscular at the chest and arms, and he had a handlebar moustache. But his attire wasn’t altogether old fashioned. It was faded to hell, sure, but he was wearing a Metallica shirt and a pair of dark Levis. And I was pretty sure he was packing a revolver in the holster by his right hip.
“Me? Uh, what is there to drink?”
The barman turned and gestured to the wall at his back. It was covered in bottles with no tags on them, only liquids in various shades of brown and grey. “Take your pick, though for you I’d recommend a little fire water to take the edge off.”
“Fire water?” Alcohol. “I, no thanks, actually I’m here looking for someone.”
“Everyone’s looking for someone here.”
Second time someone had said that. “Yeah, I’ve heard. Anyway, I—”
“Listen, you either order something or you can see yourself out. I don’t give stuff away for free.”
I tapped my back pocket, hoping, slipped my hand into it and fished out a still wet ten dollar bill. On the one hand I was buzzing to have found money in a pair of jeans I hadn’t worn in a long time. On the other, the note was ruined–and I didn’t think to bring my wallet with me into the Underworld.
The barman eyed up the ten dollar bill from the other side of the bar and sighed deeply.
“This is all I’ve got,” I said.
“Doesn’t look legit to me.”
“It’s real.”
“Lemme see here,” said the barman, and he snatched the sloshy paper from my fingers. “Who is this, on the bill?”
“Hamilton.”
“Who?”
“Alexander Hamilton. This is a current ten dollar bill.”
The barman slapped the bill on the counter and slid it my way again. “Living currency is no good here,” he said, “I’m lookin’ for dead currency, old notes. Or, failing that, a day of your life.”
“A day?”
I was starting to learn that the dead had a kind of sixth sense. They could tell I was alive just by looking at me. It couldn’t have been a physical thing given that I was about as pale as anyone else in the bar. It had to be mystical.
“That’s how much a drink down here is worth,” the barman said, leaning over the bar. “That’s how much my time is worth.”
“I’m not about to give you a day of my life just so that you can answer a question. I don’t even know if you know who I’m looking for.”
“Sure I do,” he said.
“Oh? How?”
“Because why else would a pretty little red-head like you have come all the way down here from the above? Sure ain’t for the drink.”
“So you know something, then. And if you do, you’ll know it’s dangerous.”
“Not to me it ain’t.”
“Maybe not to you, but what about the rest of the good people of this town?”
“Do I look like a sheriff to you?”
“No. You look like someone who’s more interested in getting paid than doing a good deed.”
“Listen missy. I don’t run no God-dang quid pro quo service. You want something? You pay for it.” The barman straightened up. “I suggest you leave, red. Otherwise some of these folks might mistake you for one of my girls, an’ I ain’t gonna stop them.”
My chest tightened at the barman’s suggestion. My hands clenched into fists and I started to grind my teeth. Who the hell was this guy to threaten me? I wasn’t about to have a power trip, but he must have seen what I did to Huntley back there. I wasn’t just alive, I was a witch. But I had to pick my battles, and this wasn’t one of them.
I grabbed the wet note from the table and kicked off the stool I had partially sat down on, but before I could leave someone grabbed my arm.
My entire body began to vibrate. I felt my Power flash within, and for a moment I felt like I could turn this entire building inside out at the wave of my hand and the click of my finger. I would not let myself be intimidated by these people. The person who had grabbed me, though, wasn’t a dirty old drunk. Her bony fingers gave her away before I even turned around. And when I did, the adrenaline surge disappeared and my body relaxed.
“It comes,” she said.
“What?”
Her face was sunken and her lips were cracked, but her eyes were like shiny opals against her tanned skin. T
he woman’s hair was long, black and curly, and she was covered in bracelets and necklaces of varying size, color and possibly origin. She looked very much like a classical gypsy woman, a Romani, and her eyes gave away a kind of intelligence I simply couldn’t compete with.
Was she the person Collette had sensed from outside? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t have that ability. But I only needed to look at this woman to know I was in the presence of some kind of sage. And a sage with a strong grip, at that.
“The entity you are looking for knows you are here,” she said.
“It… knows?”
“We must leave this place. It is not safe here, for you.”
She tugged on my arm and I followed, and together we made a quick exit through the swinging doors to the Saloon. The patrons largely ignored us, but I could feel the icy chill of death at my back as I left. And with my back turned to it, the Saloon didn’t seem quite as friendly or as jolly as it was on my way in. The piano’s notes were discordant and disorganized. Voices muted to whispers and glasses clinking without hands to guide them.
I hadn’t noticed until we reached the street that I had been holding a breath in my lungs as we left.
I allowed myself a moment to breathe and turned to the Saloon. Its doors swung closed, and tendrils of smoke writhed between them, above them, and beneath them. We’ll be right here, it would say, waiting for you to come back.
“Come,” said the woman, “We must speak quickly. Time is short.”
I turned to her. “But my friends are around here, I have to get them.”
“No,” she said, stern and unmoving. “There is something I must give you if you wish to defeat the evil.”
How could I argue with that?
We made our way briskly down a stony lane, at the sides of which stood buildings of mishmash design. And the more of them I saw, the more I started to realize that the buildings—much like the inhabitants of this little town in the middle of the Underworld—shared something in common. None of them had windows, many were covered in thick cobwebs, and most showed signs of some kind of damage.
One colonial had charred swaths streaking out of the tops of windows. A wooden house had had its ceiling caved in, though by what I couldn’t tell. And the more modern looking townhouse was cracked right down the middle and looked about ready to collapse into itself.
“Why are these houses damaged?” I asked.
“There are more ghosts here than just people,” said the gypsy.
“What do you mean?”
“When something dies or is destroyed, it comes here. A person, an animal, a house, a car. It all comes here.”
We made a turn between buildings and hurried round the back where a chain-link fence was all that stood between Missington’s inhabitants and a… Winnebego. The RV was huge, but it had seen better days. The front of the vehicle had been completely smashed in, as if it had run at full speed into a huge rock or a solid wall. I suspected it was once a light brown color, but time and damage had rendered it a coffee brown and the area around the windshield a charcoal black.
The gypsy woman went up to the side of the van and opened the small door.
“Hurry,” she said, “We do not have much time.”
CHAPTER 16
The gypsy led me into a van which smelt vaguely of a type of incense I couldn’t quite put my finger on and was covered in ornaments of indeterminate origin. She hurried into the back room, beyond a beaded curtain, and asked me to follow. Through the curtain I came to a small room with no bed, only a set of chairs and a table covered in a purple cloth.
“Sit,” she said, and I did.
The gypsy pulled the cloth off the table to reveal a crystal ball beneath it. The stand was a beautiful ornament; a green and blue design I had never seen before. Snakes, wolves, birds, and even spiders decorated the circular platform that supported the crystal ball atop it. On the table I also noticed a purple pouch and a deck of Nordic tarot cards.
“My name is Madame Aishe,” said the gypsy. “And you come here in search of a torn soul.”
I nodded.
The gypsy waved her hands over the crystal ball in the same way fortune tellers do in movies and two-bit parlors. I had been to one before, a long time ago, and decided it wasn’t for me. I didn’t like being told that my grandmother missed me and then getting charged twenty five dollars for the consultation like the gypsy was some kind of doctor I was visiting. I knew my grandmother missed me. What I wanted was for the gypsy to tell me her name—that would have impressed me. But I detected a slight vibration in the air when Madame Aishe ran her hands over the crystal ball; like a kind of pulse radiating outward from it.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
The gypsy closed her eyes. “The red witch,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“Your soul speaks to me, child. It speaks to everyone with the ability to listen. It wants to be heard.”
“My soul wants to be heard?”
“Heard. Acknowledged. Liberated.”
Liberated. I didn’t like the sound of liberated. “Tell me what you know of why I have come here.”
The gypsy sighed and placed her hands on the table. She opened her eyes. “You seek a powerful being,” she said, “A being which will not go willingly back into its cage.”
Color me impressed. “Do you know where I can find it?”
“I do. It comes sometimes to the city and reaps.”
“Reaps?”
“Souls; they fuel its dark power.”
The Shadow is using ghosts to fuel its magick? Is this what Frank meant when he said that Necromancers were shifty and that their power was stolen? I was starting to learn a lot about the Underworld simply by being down here, and one of the most important things I had learned was that the Underworld took — as Collette had put it. If that was true, then it meant that Collette’s magick also took. But what did it take? I dreaded to think of the answer.
“Tell me where I can find it and how I can stop it,” I said.,
“Your power is impressive, sorceress,” the gypsy said, “But not as impressive as it could be. As it will be.”
“Why did you just call me a sorceress?”
This wasn’t the first time someone had used that word to describe me. As far as I knew, witches and sorcerers were the same thing; just labelled differently. But the way the word had been spoken implied something else, implied meaning.
“Your power is not dependent on external knowledge,” said the gypsy, “Your power comes from the fire of your own soul. Yours is the magick of the universe. All you have to do is go deeper into yourself to find it.”
“Go deeper? I don’t understand. I’m a witch.”
The gypsy shook her head. “A witch’s power comes from without, a sorcerer’s power from within. You are rare. You are the one who can defeat the Shadow, but you must be careful.”
I nodded. “Tell me what I have to do.”
The gypsy pulled her deck of cards closer to her side and then began to draw them. It was a simple Celtic cross: a cross of four cards, with one above, one beneath, and four to the left of it. The cards came fast, one by one lining up to reveal my fate. I knew them all, but Tarot wasn’t something I had dedicated time to learning before. I didn’t know what the cards in the order they had come in meant; but three cards caught my eye, and caused my insides to go even colder. Something I didn’t think possible.
“Why?” I asked, “Why this?”
“Because for all your power, you are blind. Fate,” she said, “Is not on your side. You are the chosen one, but you have misused your power. Fate will not help you.”
Kyle came rushing back to mind like a headache. I was young! I wanted to say, I didn’t know what I was doing! But I knew my breath would fall on deaf ears. I knew all too well that Fate was a living, breathing thing. It did not forgive. It did not forget.
“How can that be? How can I have been chosen as the one to defeat this thing and Fate won
’t help?”
“Listen to me,” she said, “I am showing you these cards because you must learn your fate before you leave this place. Memorize their order, recall their meaning, and understand that the answers you are looking for lie within them.”
I arched my neck to get a better view. Cups, Wands, Fate, the High Priestess; these cards were benign, but the others were not. The Devil. Death. The Ten of Swords. The Queen of Swords. These cards gave me pause. The Ten of Swords in particular. Most people believe that the Death card is a bad omen, that it’s the worst card in the deck, but it isn’t. The worst card is the Ten of Swords, because that card represents an obliteration of everything I hold dear. It represents pain, misery, strife, actual death and utter devastation.
No one ever wants the Ten of Swords to show up during a reading.
The gypsy reached into a trunk tucked away beneath the table, in the space between table and wall, and produced two items. First, an uninspiring metal urn. Second, a silver necklace with a stone at its center. I recognized the curved, shiny gem as Black Onyx. It made sense that the stone be Black Onyx, since it was a stone frequently associated with protection from negativity and negative energies. I gathered that they were for me.
My sword and my shield, so to speak.
“Take these,” said the gypsy, “And head east. At the end of the tunnel you will encounter the River of Bone. You must cross it if you wish to find the shadow’s hiding place.”
“Why are you giving these to me?”
“I was buried with them,” she said, “Fate has an interesting way of preparing us for the future, only it doesn’t care if you would be alive or dead when it called on you to act. When I read of your coming in the cards, I knew you would need these items.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” I said.
The gypsy nodded. “I have seen too many souls taken by this evil and wonder when my time shall come. I hope, now that you are here, my time never will.”
I paused. In the space between seconds I wondered whether it would be best to take what she had said and leave to find Collette and the others, or ask her a question she had just prompted. Of course, curious as I was, I couldn’t resist. “What would happen to you, if it… took you?”