Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (19 page)

“Anytime, really,” I repeated, some of the vines getting past my defenses and crawling up my body.

“Fletch!” Caleb called out. “Help her!”

This seemed to shake the hippie out of his fugue state of fascination. In a flash he ran from the side of the path until he was standing right in front of me, looking down at the vines that had a grip on me.

“Hey, buddy,” Fletcher said, laying his hands on the vine that was quickly constricting across my midsection. “It’s all good. We’re
friends
.”

Despite the soothing tone in his words, the vine continued wrapping itself, snaking up and around my neck.

“Apparently, it didn’t get the memo,” I said before the tendril slid over my mouth and cut me off.

Fletcher and I both latched onto the vine pulling at it, but it would not budge.

“Don’t be like that,” he said, using an even more soothing tone than the last. “Come on, now.”

The breath in my chest grew shallower and shallower, each exhale allowing the vine to tighten further around me. Stars of light danced before my eyes.

“Stay with me, Lex,” Caleb called out from the bushes nearby as his own struggle escalated, his head disappearing completely into it.

I wanted to call out that this certainly wasn’t the way I wanted to go down. If Rory were here with that damned pole arm of hers, she’s be cutting through our leafy attackers with no problem, but no. I had to go and trust Caleb and his damned hippie friend.

“Shh!” Fletcher said, stroking the vine like it was a pet now. “Don’t be like this.”

Jesus. If I had to rely on these two, I’d be unconscious or worse in the next twenty seconds or so. Despite vines covering my face I managed to still speak out one of the family’s old words of power, reaching out with whatever hold I could get on any kind of stone around me. The sensation came back to me in small dots and jags as I willed what I could latch onto toward my one open hand.

The surface of my hand stung as stone after tiny stone collided with it. The surface of most of them was too smooth or the stones themselves too insubstantial to do anything with. One, however, struck the palm of my hand and a warm trickle of blood opened up on me from its impact.

It had
cut
me. Meaning it had an edge.

I closed my hand around it, making a fist with one end of the stone sticking out of it. I gripped it with such force that the cut across my hand deepened, more blood dripping from it now, but I refused to let go. Instead, I darted my fist up and into the vines, tearing into them with the protruding jag of stone. The alarm of the creature was evidenced by the twitch the rest of the vines gave, but rather than further tightening around me, it lashed away from me.

Fletcher fell back as a whiplike tip of the vine struck him in the face. Startled, his eyes went white and wide, but that did not last long. Even in the moonlight I could see the whites disappear as the blacks of his pupils filled his eyes. A darkness replaced the light, easy nature of the man, an otherworldliness erupting out of him.

“I tried to go easy on you,” he shouted, his voice now a fearful roar of wind in my ears, “but you have chosen destruction over living.”

Other than his eyes, Fletcher did not look any different. The only change was the distinct sensation of power that radiated off of him like a miniature sun.

The creature towered over Fletcher, focusing its branches and vines on snagging him. With one hand he caught vines one after another, and with a preternatural strength twisted the writhing natural tentacles into a mass of knots. After what seemed like a never-ending stream of them, Fletcher tugged the knotted bunch and pulled the creature down onto the path.

Once grounded, the creature looked more like a beaver dam than anything. Still, it struggled and writhed as it tried to break free of Fletcher’s grip, but it was no use. Fletcher advanced on the monster, pulling himself closer as he took up the vines. It reminded me of the world’s craziest game of tug-of-war ever imagined. When he had closed within five feet of the giant mass, Fletcher let go, leapt higher into the air than a human could go, and crashed down into the center of the creature’s mass, disappearing from sight.

A growl drove into my ears from within the creature. At first I thought it might be some kind of stomach, but then I realized to my surprise that it sounded more like it belonged to Fletcher. It rose to a near-deafening pitch as the bushes and limbs shook. The sharp sound of wood cracking was so intense it felt as if the island of Manhattan itself might be splitting in two.

The vines on Caleb and me went slack, reversing their courses down our bodies and back into the creature’s mass. Shifting and twisting, the creature could not hold its shape. The vast trunks that stuck out shrunk one by one into itself, bits of green brush and branches flying off as they came free of it. Glimpses of Fletcher caught my eye through the creature as it diminished in size until it was no more than a pile of dead wood and shredded greenery.

Fletcher strode from the center of the chaos. His hair was wild, his eyes still pitch-black, and his Hulk-like body ripped with muscles that strained for release inside the now-tight T-shirt he wore. The closer he came to us, the more his body seemed to normalize, his hair smoothing as his pupils shrank and his muscles returned to what they were before.

Now that the path was no longer blocked, Caleb held a hand up for me to wait a minute, then took off up the path.

Fletcher leaned forward, winded, and laid both hands on his knees.

“That was . . . impressive,” I said, reaching down to reclaim the sage I had dropped earlier.

Fletcher’s face was full of distaste. “I wish that this would not come down to that,” he said between breaths. “This abomination rising like that, the fear that grew such a creature . . . Something must have spooked these woods to have it act so.”

“The path looks clear up ahead,” Caleb said, coming back to us.

“Let us proceed, then,” Fletcher said, not quite sounding like himself, as if a darkness still held sway over him. “And the wicked that dares turn my own forest against me had better be prepared to answer for its perversion.”

The three of us went along the now-open path, Caleb and I having to hurry just to keep up with Fletcher as he scampered ahead. The path twisted and turned several times as we wound our way forward before rising up to the crest of a short hill.

The trees parted as the path opened up onto a grand clearing, one much larger than I imagined. Short, rolling hills were dotted with grave markers—tombstones, statues in mourning, mausoleums—and I was surprised by the sheer number of them. There were hundreds.

“Whoa,” I said. “This place is huge. How has no one ever stumbled upon it before? It must take up half of Central Park.”

“I doubt this place would show up on Google Maps,” Caleb said. “I’m not sure we’re really even in the city right now. Look.”

Caleb pointed far off in the distance just above the line of trees, and while I could make out hints of the Manhattan skyline, it both was and wasn’t there, like a ghost image on a piece of old film that had been double exposed.

“Do I even want to know?” I asked him.

“Freelancing has taught me a few things,” he said. “Don’t eat
anything
a witch or warlock offers you when you first meet, anyone who says that they can help magically improve your sex life usually means the opposite, and when it comes to the impossibly arcane, it’s best to just roll with it and not stress out about logic too much.”

“That sounds like good advice,” I said, looking away from the existent/nonexistent skyline. “My brain was starting to hurt.”

“Come,” Fletcher said, pointing to the uppermost peak out in the middle of the cemetery. He started for it, going up and over hill after hill, and the two of us followed.

“The Butcher is kept in a place of honor?” I asked.

Fletcher shook his head. “No,” he said. “That is not a place of honor. It is a reminder to all who visit here.”

“A reminder of what?”

“To not become a megalomaniac hedonistic warlock,” Caleb said. “Am I right?”

Fletcher laughed at that. “You do have a way with words, man,” he said, “but yeah. More or less. I think it helps keep those who crave power in check.”

“Who keeps
you
in check?” I asked.

Fletcher looked at me, a bit of a stoner smile on his face. “Me? I’m good, man. I’m not looking for power.”

“You
are
power,” I said.

He burst out laughing. “I am?” he asked, totally oblivious. “Whatever you say, lady.”

I looked to Caleb, but he shook his head, indicating it might be best if I stopped asking such ridiculous questions of a creature I didn’t know all that well. We walked on in silence, following him for several more minutes.

Fletcher was standing at the top of the hill by the time the two of us joined him there. The hilltop was nothing more than what looked like a pile of rocks.

“Is this a cairn?” Caleb asked.

Fletcher shook his head. “It is not supposed to be, no.”

There was no rhyme or reason to the assemblage of stones up there. Only one explanation made sense. Whatever
had
been up here had been destroyed.

“Where’s the gravestone?” I asked. “Or the grave, for that matter.”

“Well, this is a bit problematic,” Caleb said, letting his bundle of sage fall to the ground and kicking over one of the stones.

The letters
ORMA
were carved distinctly into one of the broken pieces at his feet.

“Here be the last resting place of Robert Patrick Dorman,” I said. “Guess there’s nothing left but to see if the ancient psychotic is still resting here.”

I gathered myself closer to the pile of debris as I slid off my backpack and switched my sage for my family’s stone spell book. Pressing my palm to it, I whispered the word of opening and the rock transformed to its natural book state of leather and paper. My will snapped to that of the stones scattered before me, and I pulled at them with my will in large groups, forcing them up and away from what remained of the grave site.

When the dust settled after the initial dig, Fletcher plunged his arms into what little dirt was left in the hole. Using the preternatural strength he had exhibited earlier, the forest spirit hefted out the coffin beneath. When the dirt fell away from it, all that was left was the twisted remains of what looked like a metal coffin.

I knocked my knuckles against it as I moved closer to confirm it.

“Iron,” Caleb said. “To ward off certain types of supernatural creatures.”

“But clearly not gargoyles,” I said, running my hand along the clawed-up iron of the lid. I held my phone’s flashlight up to the opening. “Empty. That takes care of one of the things we came here to check on. We can confirm that the Butcher’s body is indeed missing. That’s going to make it harder to track his gargoyle form down.”

“No bones about it,” Caleb said with a smirk.

I stared daggers at him, so not in the mood for levity right then.

“And correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, unable to hide my testiness, “but according to what Fletcher said, won’t we need the Butcher’s
body
if we’re going to stop him?”

Caleb’s joviality died on his lips. “We do,” he said as the realization sunk in. “No body, no ritual. We can’t smudge his bones if we can’t find them.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and take a guess that maybe the Butcher came here and reclaimed his own body so that no one could do what we were about to do,” I said. “What do you think, Fletch?”

My question was met with silence.

“Fletch?” I repeated, turning around. The man was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s like Batman, I swear,” Caleb said, starting down the hill. “Come on. He’s got to be around here somewhere.”

Having learned a lot from watching
Scooby-Doo
, I decided it was best that the two of us stick together while wandering a cemetery. Working ourselves away from the Butcher’s tomb at the center of it, we circled out and around, calling Fletcher’s name as we went until we got an answer.

“Over here, man,” his voice shouted out from somewhere far off to our left. “I think.”

Caleb and I scrambled up over the next hill, and then the next one, in pursuit of it.

“Over where?” I said, hoping to course-correct ourselves as we went.

“What did you say the family’s name was again?” Fletch called out from just over the next hill, a little more to our right than I had thought.

“O’Shea,” I said.

“Then I found it!”

“That was quick,” I said, heading up and over the hill with Caleb behind me.

“It’s kind of hard to miss,” Fletcher said, and when I saw what he had found, it was most definitely true.

One entire hill among all the rest of them had been removed in its entirety. In its place was a massive domed structure, the designs and carvings all along it of a Gothic yet Celtic nature. It had to be at least the size of the Church at Saint Mark’s Place. Over its entrance the word
O’SHEA
was carved in two-feet-tall letters. The entrance itself was an elaborately carved archway that stood at least twenty feet across. Bits of the archway were crumbling, but not from signs of age or wear. Two massive gold-leafed doors lay crumbled mere feet away from it, the hardware that had been holding them in place still attached to pieces of crumbling rock.

“You really need to hire a groundskeeper for this place,” I said.

Fletcher shook his head. “No, man, this graveyard wasn’t like this the other day.”

“All this damage is new?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Let’s just hope no one is still inside,” I said, starting toward it. “And, against my better judgment, let’s check it out. It’s quiet, so there should be no surprises, right . . . ?”

Caleb paused at the entrance. “Until someone jumps out of a coffin at us,” he said, and turned to look out the archway where Fletcher was still standing. “You coming?”

“No, man,” he said. “I like it out here better. Buildings and enclosed spaces give me the creeps. I only promised you I’d take you to the cemetery. I’ve done that.”