Salem's Revenge Complete Boxed Set (47 page)

Trish

I
t takes all her mental capacity to withhold her thoughts from her children. Speaking in their heads is as easy for her as thinking, and yet she must separate the two. If nothing else, her thoughts must remain her own.

The Changelings have gone ahead to scout, while she and her children will follow behind soon after.

Her children gather around her, clothing her in a silver satin dress and braiding white flowers into her hair. They sprinkle sweet-smelling liquid on her neck and the inside of her wrists. Finally, they adorn her with a necklace made from rolled up leaves and bright white stones.

You look beautiful, Mother
, they tell her when they’re finished.

Thank you, my children
, she answers, wondering how they all look so perfect without help. But she doesn’t ask for fear of sounding silly.

As they move through the verdant green grass toward the edge of the forest, the spirit deer from the night before flanks them, bounding ahead. Leading them.
What is it?
she asks before she can stop herself.

Her tall, reed-like child glides next to her, appearing as though her naked feet don’t touch the grass. With a start, she realizes her own feet are a handbreadth off the ground, too.
Mother, you’ve seen this deer before. Many, many times. Remember what it is. Remember.

She strains at her memories, seeking for something buried deep inside her. All she remembers is the deer leading her the night before. How could she have seen the deer before then? She’s only a child. She’s never even walked through the woods before. And yet, she
does
know the deer.

Our Creator
, she says, the truth of the answer as clear as the pink sky overhead. Despite having not slept the night before, she feels as refreshed as if she’s just swum in a clear, cold spring.

Yes. She guides us
, her child adds.

But how can she be the Mother when she’s not the Creator? She already knows. She’s always known, but could never access the knowledge. Until now. The Creator made her first, called her Mother. Gave her the power to bear Children. The Creator is the spirit of the earth. The giver of power. And the taker away.

Flashes of lifetimes rip through her mind. A woman with jet-black hair, flitting amongst the dead on a haze-filled day, tending to those still living, bandaging their wounds, cupping their heads and dripping water from a sponge past their dry chapped lips; an ivory-skinned girl touching the backs of dark-skinned slaves, pushing energy into their sapped muscles, giving them the impossible strength required to pull the ropes that burn their hands, to lift monstrous stone blocks many times heavier than their combined weight; an old woman, her skin wrinkled and aged and weather-beaten, knocking a child away from the gaping maw of a fanged beast, screaming until the tiger-like creature bounds away, leaving them in peace. Many more lifetimes rush past, so many she can barely keep up.

And though it’s impossible, she knows that the black-haired woman, the ivory-skinned girl, the old woman, and all the other females in her visions…

Are her.

~~~

As the day passes, her Children tell her stories of past lives. The memories begin fuzzy, blurry around the edges, but seem to sharpen with each passing moment. They are the forever Children, those who have been there from the beginning and those who will be there at the end. And she is their forever Mother.

And they have a role to play in clearing the darkness that has covered the earth. The only thing she doesn’t understand is why the President of New America must die. Have the Claires given up on humankind after being their protectors for thousands of years? She’s afraid to ask. She doesn’t like the Changeling woman, but whatever alliance has been formed is moving forward already, and she feels powerless to stop it.

She doesn’t even know if she should stop it.

A night passes, her children marching on, their silver, blue, and white dresses glowing softly in the dark. Her own garb seems just a shade brighter than the others. Night turns to day and day to night again, and they travel onwards, never tiring, as if time stands still all the while.

For the last half-day, a dangerous thought has been tugging at her heartstrings. What if I’m on the wrong side? She should know right from wrong—she’s the Mother after all—but her thoughts are not yet complete; and anyway, each memory is a reminder that humans and her people have co-existed peacefully for centuries.

There’s only one person she trusts implicitly in this lifetime, who’s never steered her wrong, who’s always been there for her:

Laney.

She might not be her child, and although she’s only her sister in a single lifetime, barely a second in the infinite expanse of her existence, she is the essence of right.

The words come to her as easily as breaths during a deep sleep.

Just as the first rays of orange morning light slip over the horizon, she murmurs the words of an old spell she hasn’t used in decades.

Kul tu alla ketra
, she says to the earth. And then she speaks their names.

Two slivers of the pulsing white light inside her slide from her fingertip and drop to the forest floor, disappearing into the earth.

This is good
, she thinks to herself.
This is right.

Rhett

I
t’s more of a thud than a splat.

The sound makes me cringe and turn away from Eddie X’s body, which surely will never throw another grenade. What he saw to prompt him to leap from the roof, I’ll probably never know, but I do know who caused it.

The witch. Even as she pushes to her feet, one of her legs wobbling slightly, I’m stuck to the street. I can feel my fingers and toes and I can move my head, which I think are all good signs, but I don’t have the strength to stand.

With measured strides, she makes her way over to me. Her legs are fleshy pale between a black mini-skirt and black knee-high boots. A white tank top reveals strong arms and a lean torso. She brushes her hand across her face, pushing her hair away, sticky with blood from the gash on her forehead.

She stands over me and all I can do is watch, my sword clutched in a hand too weak to lift it.

This could be it—the end. All I’ve fought for, all I’ve been through, for nothing. I couldn’t save Beth, nor could I avenge her death.

“Poor wittle witch hunter,” the witch says, picking at one of her nails, which are long and painted black. The one she’s playing with is broken. She peels it off and flicks it in my face. “Now. Tell me how you did it.”

“Did what?” I wheeze, playing dumb. It even hurts to speak.

“Oww!” I scream as she steps on my hand with her boot heel. “Okay, okay!”

She lifts her boot, but far too slowly for my liking. I can’t flex my fingers; it feels like my knuckles have been removed. “Tell me,” she says.

“I’m…I’m a…”

“Spit it out!” she shrieks, raising her boot again.

Two things happen at that moment:

First, her command is cut off when an arrow punches through the side of her cheek, and because her mouth is wide open I’m able to see the shaft sliding all the way through, before it exits out the other cheek. Before she can even drop to the ground, another arrow plunges through her ear. Blood sprays in a liquid arc that reminds me of the way water shoots from some kinds of backyard sprinklers.

Her body thumps beside me, her vacant green eyes staring lifelessly into mine.

Gross.

The second thing that happens is harder to describe. A strange, glowing sliver of light runs along the street, popping up once or twice, almost like a gopher peeking its head from its hole. Eventually, however, the gopher-light reaches me, and as my eyes widen and my lips part in awe, the sliver slips inside my mouth.

I let out a high-pitched yelp and leap to my feet, scrubbing at my tongue, which feels numb, with my hand. When I realize my efforts are having no impact, I stop and withdraw my hand, only to find it glowing. In fact, my whole body is glowing slightly, pulsing with white light.

And then, like a nightlight being switched off, it winks out and my skin returns to its normal chocolate-brown color.

Weird. Even for the witch apocalypse that was weird.

I gasp when I realize what’s even weirder. I’m standing. I look down at my knee, which I expect to be dark with early bruising, but it looks the same. When I flex my leg, it doesn’t so much as sting. And the rest of me—my shoulder, my chest, my cheek—are all free of scrapes and pain. It’s as if I wasn’t thrown through the air by a grenade blast at all. Like I imagined it.

The light healed me, I realize with a start.

But before I can think too much about it, a voice says, “You owe me, Rhett.”

I whirl around to find Bil Nez standing ten feet away, his crossbow raised and aimed. But not at me. Past me, toward—I turn and glance behind me—Graves, who is groaning and trying to regain his feet.

“Thank you,” I say, turning back. “You might’ve saved my life.”

“Might’ve?” he says. “You couldn’t move. She could. There was no
might’ve
in the equation.”

“How did you do the thing with the light?” I ask.

His head cocks to the side. “You’re not making any sense. Maybe your life flashed before your eyes—I dunno.”

“Was it a healing potion? Some kind of a spell you learned?” He did something to me. Something to heal me.

He glares at me. “I’m not a warlock, dumb-dumb. I resist spells, not use them.”

Right. Of course. Duh. Then who?

Another groan from Graves.

“What should we do about them?” Bil asks, gesturing with his crossbow.

The End has caused me a lot of trouble recently, but I’m not really in the business of murder, particularly those who are helping in the fight against notorious witch gangs like the Hallucinators. “You work for New America. They work for New America. Don’t you communicate with them somehow?”

Bil looks at me like I’m a kindergartner trying to learn to spell cat and getting it backwards. “Each group of New America witch hunters is separate. Different missions, different dynamics. We’re not some big, happy family. Me, I’m a solo artist. I avoid other witch hunters like the plague.”

Okay then. “But shouldn’t we make sure they’re all right?” I don’t exactly have any affection for Graves or Silent or any of them really, but some of the other witch hunters in their group might be okay, assigned to The End by some oblivious general.

“They can fend for themselves. Let’s get outta here.” Bil starts to back away, his crossbow never leaving Graves, who’s staggering slightly, one hand on his forehead and the other rubbing his back. The Silent Assassin is still down, not moving, but further down the street some of the other witch hunters are pulling themselves up. Injured, but not dead. At least not yet.

Now that there seem to be enough of the witch hunters alive to pull themselves together and take care of those that are the most badly injured, I’m thinking Bil’s suggestion is a good one. Soon we could be outnumbered and then anything could hap—

“Rhett Carter and Bil Nez!” Graves roars, cutting off my thoughts and surprising me with the strength of his voice. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. And today’s a two for one special.”

To him, the business of death and revenge is like going grocery shopping. “The sale’s over,” I say. “You’d be dead if not for us. Go tend to your hunters and we’ll call it even.” I start to back away, following Bil’s lead.

“I don’t think so,” Graves says. Something pings off the ground at his feet, just the tinkle of metal on asphalt, like a dropped coin or…

…the firing pin on a grenade.

I realize too late that Eddie X’s last grenade, the one that fell to the street and rolled next to Graves, isn’t there, and Graves wasn’t rubbing his back, he was hiding it behind him. And now he’s pulled the pin out.

He smiles. “Hey, Rhett. Where’s your dog? I’d have liked to have made it a three for one special. What’s that mutt’s name again?”

Just as Graves cocks his arm back, revealing the black explosive in his palm, I turn and start to run, watching as Bil does the same. I look back once and shout, “Hex!” to answer his question.

All I see is the grenade spinning through the air, a black oval on a bright blue background. It’s coming too fast and I’m too slow and if it was a football I’d be on the perfect trajectory to catch it and trot into the end zone. But this is one football I don’t want to catch.

My eyes widen and I try to stop, to turn back toward Graves, who will surely be out of range of his own grenade, but my momentum is too much, carrying me forward, and the weapon is arcing downward, right toward me, perhaps a second away from exploding and turning me into Rhett-goo.

As if travelling through a wormhole from an alternate dimension, Hex appears in midair, his paws leading, his mouth open, his tongue out, and—

He catches the grenade in his mouth, as if he’s just showing off, playing a fun game of Frisbee.

Except in this case he gulps at the air and swallows the Frisbee. Only the Frisbee is a grenade. I finally skid to a stop, my eyes widening, my hand instinctively going to my mouth in horror.

No, Hex. No.

Hex lands beside me, his tail wagging, grinning devilishly.

No. Bad, dog. Bad.

“Oh Hex,” I say, feeling ill, not caring that I’m far too close to him for my own safety.

He barks once and then it happens. His body bulges outward rapidly, like a limp balloon instantly going from deflated to filled with air. At the same time, his feet pop off the ground, shooting him up a few feet. He looks like a mini, dog-shaped blimp.

He coughs and smoke pours from his ears and nose, and then a spout of flames erupt from his mouth, narrowly missing me. He burps and the air rushes from him, returning his body to normal size and his feet to the ground.

I crouch down and he runs up, licking me with a tongue that’s black with ash. “Good dog,” I say, scratching him under the chin, not caring that he’s smearing blackened saliva all over my face. “Best dog.”

“Rhett,” Bil says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “We can all hug and cry later. Now we’d better get outta here before Graves finds something else to blow up.”

Graves glares at us as we take off, Bil’s crossbow trained on him the whole time, so he doesn’t try anything stupid.

And I can’t wipe the smile off my face, even as I realize that I’ve never felt so whole or had so much energy in my entire life.

As my fists pump on either side, I barely notice a white pulsing sheen on my skin.