Witch's Bell Book One (12 page)

Ebony didn't reply, just bore her
practiced evil eye through the back of Nate's chair, hoping to give
him at the very least that horrible sensation of being watched, if
not a mild headache.

Silence fell again, but only in words.
The sound of the tires grinding over the road, Ben's hands sliding
across the wheel as he took corners too fast, and the general
hubbub of the rest of the traffic made sure that things weren't all
that quiet. Still, Ebony started to feel the silence around her. It
prickled up her arms like a spider in the night. It was that
strange silence that would fall over a group when they were waiting
for the yet-unsaid to make itself heard. Only problem was, Ebony
realized as she scratched at her arms, there was an edge to this
silence, an expectant edge.

“
So,” Nate said with a tortured
sigh, “are you going to tell me what the consequences are, or are
you going to leave me hanging? Tell me, consultant witch, what's
going to happen to us if we have to call in for backup?”

But Ebony was no longer
listening to his words; she was listening to the pronounced
silences that punctuated around them, like hail before a
storm.
“Shhh,” she said sharply, “do you hear that?” she put a
hand flat on the window, repositioning herself so that she could
get a better view of the sky outside.

Things were growing dark outside. But
not the natural, welcome dark that drew on into night. This one
came from the brewing storm clouds above. The very same wisps at
the horizon that Ebony had been able to dismiss at midday were now
collecting into a wall of blue-gray menace.

“
What?” Nate said, more
irritated than interested. “I don't hear anything?”

“
Precisely,” Ebony bit at her
lip. “It's going to start raining in a second,” she
predicted.

Sure enough, as Ben slowed down at a
set of lights, his fingers drumming repetitively on the leather
steering wheel, the sky opened up. Tiny droplets of rain started to
hit the roof of the car, slide down the windows, and streak the
pavement outside. They began to grow fatter as the seconds passed,
until Ben slid a hand over the wipers, turning them on with a
practiced move.

“
You think I'm supposed to be
impressed by that?” Nate intoned, voice drawn out. “It doesn't take
a witch to realize clouds like that—”

Ebony suddenly clicked her
fingers with a poignant snap.
“And then thunder.”

In a second the heavens opened up with
a roar. Though the thunder wasn't close, it still managed to jangle
the little lucky-charm that Ben had wound around his rear-vision
mirror. Ebony had given him that charm. It was a set of three
golden bells on a tiny silver chain. Even though it was something
she'd just picked up from a trinket store, and it didn't actually
have any magical credibility, Ben swore by it. And that was enough,
Ebony knew, to make it thoroughly magical anyway.

Now those little tiny bells jingled
with a fitful dance, as the thunder roared above.

“
How did you know that?” Nate
turned in his chair when the thunder finally abated.

“
It's not done yet,” Ebony
angled her face upward as if confident she could stare right
through the top of the car and out at the stormy sky above. She
couldn't, of course, but that wasn't the point. “This is going to
be one Hell of a storm.”

“
Sit around in your chair,” Ben
said quickly, clapping a hand onto Nate's shoulder and dragging him
back around to a respectable seated position. “I'm about to hit the
highway, and hit it hard.”

“
Atta boy,” Ebony said
appreciatively. That was the great thing about Detective Ben Tate.
Well, one of the great things about him. Though you wouldn't know
it, his father was somewhat of a misfit – running bootleg-alcohol
around Vale as a young man. Ben's father had gotten quite the
reputation for driving like a bat out of hell, to borrow a phrase.
A skill he had passed on to each of his sons. Though Ben, for the
most part, would drive like an ordinary police officer ought.
During times of high-speed-need, Ben knew exactly where to put his
foot.

“
Seriously,” Nate said after a
moment, hand on the handle above the passenger's side window, in an
attempt to keep himself from falling out of his seat, “how did you
know that there was going to be thunder?”

Ebony sighed. She didn't like
having to explain all her magical, mysterious ways. She liked that
shiny allure that reminded everyone she wasn't just something
ordinary
–
she was a witch. For the most part, the rest of the police
department respected it too. They didn't pester her every five
seconds for an explanation about her wondrous powers. They just
asked her to do things; she did them – end of story. They let the
magic live, she reminded herself, by not prodding it into
explanations all the time. But then the idiot Chevalier had to come
along – Detective Nathan Wall – and he was so cram packed with
questions, Ebony was starting to feel like a full-time kindergarten
teacher.

If he wasn't being rude and
insensitive, he was asking her to explain her every move.
“Does it matter? I
mean, I'm a witch – isn't that explanation enough?”

“
No,” he said blankly, “because
I asked how you knew, not why you knew.”

Ebony gave a very loud, very
obvious sigh.
“Why do you even want to know? So you can debunk it? Offer
up some better, Detective Wall pre-approved explanation that's had
all the magic stripped right from it?”

“
Blimey, you'd think I'm asking
you for a kidney. All I'm asking—”

“
Is for me to explain something
that can't be explained. I'd rather give you the kidney. There's
something you obviously don't get about magic, and it's frankly
doing my head in. You don't get to think about it in your ordinary
every day ways. Magic isn't the same as newspapers, coffee, and
cold fusion. It doesn't fit into convenient definitions that you
pin up alongside science and reason for an easy and ready
comparison. Magic isn't understandable – but that doesn't make it
unbelievable either. Magic, Detective Wall, isn't a giant lollipop
covered cake-house in the forest. It's not silly tales of golden
hair and porridge. It's not fairy godmothers giving their charges
ridiculously specific curses – that type of stuff has been really
stamped down. No, Magic is when you catch a glimpse through a
window into another world.” Ebony could feel her cheeks redden as
the conversation took hold of her, the words just bubbling to get
out like magma from an erupting volcano. “Though I doubt you've
ever even had such an experience, as you're as square and blank as
a bathroom tile. But magic is little moments of wonder, different
from all that other rubbish that tumbles through your day – little
moments full of a prickly power that make you amaze at life's
possibilities, rather than routines. Magic is magical.” Ebony
finally took an immense breath and just sat there, daring Nate to
respond to such a sudden, but soulful outburst.

He didn't immediately reply
with a well-rehearsed
“really, of course,” in fact, it took him some
time to respond at all. “I know the feeling, Ebony. Trust
me.”

And that's all he said. Short,
careful, and precise. Very not like Detective Nate, Ebony thought
with pressed-lipped annoyance. How dare he just leave it there,
really, what on Earth did he mean? Ebony began to grind her teeth
in soft, silent rage.

Before Ebony could give Nate's chair
another hearty kick, Ben threw a devilish corner that took them
skidding up the narrow road that led to the cemetery. Vale Cemetery
was situated on a hill that was set several minutes outside the
city limits. It was an imperious place, with a direct view of the
city below, and the mountains behind. Vale was a sprawling
metropolis set with its back to a ragged mountain range, and its
mouth to a river that led directly to the sea. Large, wide highways
ran along the coast, either side of Vale, connecting her to the
rest of the country like a knot in a chain.

From the cemetery you could see
the city below, the ocean beyond, and the mountains behind. You
could walk in one direction and peer over the old sandstone wall,
and only see the lights, grays, browns, and blacks of the city
below. You could trick yourself into thinking that that was all
there was
–
just the stacks, buildings, roads, warehouses, silos, depots, and
houses of Vale City. But as soon as you walked to another wall,
you'd see the docks leading down to the bottle-shaped mouth of the
river, and the ocean beyond. Though the ocean didn't always glitter
or beam at you with the warm azure smile of the tropics, it still
invited the eye. It was something to do with the way the bay was
shaped, as it seemed to lead the gaze forever out onto the horizon
that was simply endless ocean.

Indeed, if Vale was a knot on a chain
of roads, then the Portal was the protrusion around which it had
formed. Making the ocean and the mountains the throat around which
the chain rested.

Ebony undid her seat belt as they
neared the gates to the cemetery. A line of other police cars were
already there, their lights flashing in the forever-dimming day.
She gathered her skirt around her, ready to leap out at the first
opportunity.

It was no mistake of analogy that had
left Ebony thinking Vale resembled a chain around the neck of the
land. It was the way the mountains led down, like a backbone, to
the narrowed point of Vale, then opened out onto the head of the
ocean.

Also, it was the way the city
itself felt. It sometimes gave her the impression of just floating
there, sitting above the land, rather than being cut into it. Yet
at other times it felt as if the whole city was talking to her, not
with the combined words, actions, creations, and aberrations of its
citizens
–
but with something far more mysterious. It was as if the Portal
itself was somehow summoning the whole city at once. Enlivening it
with the terrible, yet wonderful magic that came from the Other
Side.

None of that mattered at the
moment though, Ebony assured herself as Ben finally pulled up
alongside another car, barely turning off the engine before he was
out the door. Well it mattered, and it didn't matter at the same
time. For now she had to concentrate on the fact at hand
– some delirious
idiot about to use the souls of the recently-dead to contact Death
itself. But still, she couldn't entirely forget the mysterious and
foreboding architecture and placement of this darned cemetery. The
witches of Vale had often wondered who had designed it, or how it
had come to be. For witches past had sworn none of them had had
such a hand in city planning. No, the placement of Vale Cemetery
had all been down to the Valians – another magical accident to
chalk up on their board of ignorance.

Ebony managed to hide a little
shiver as she drew up alongside Ben as he got the low-down from a
pale-faced uniformed officer, who kept shuddering at the slightest
sound that emanated over the dense walls of the cemetery. She hoped
for one thing, and she wished for it with all her heart. Because of
where the cemetery was, because of the amount of natural magic it
seemed to command, Ebony desperately, desperately hoped no other
ah
...
thing, would get involved. Her warning to Flora had been genuine.
Practice magic without a direct purpose, and something with a
stronger purpose will take it from you. Now that warning rang in
Ebony's mind like a church bell over a silent city. Practicing
magic in a cemetery was downright dangerous to begin with. No witch
would ever do it alone. Cemeteries were places of powerful,
powerful emotion and memory – two of the key ingredients to any
magical spell. Any magical creature worth its name would know this.
As such, you never knew what you'd find lurking behind the warped
oaks, musty head stones, and corners of the old, dark crypts of
cemeteries.

Nate drew up beside her in his
usual silent fashion.
“I don't see the ghosts,” he said automatically,
using his height to peer over the wall beyond. “Shouldn't they be
zipping around the sky in trails of light, listening to loud 80's
music, and making ludicrous faces?”

“
This isn't Ghost Busters,” she
reminded him, this time with a shiver. What with the fat rain drops
and the general atmosphere of doom, she was having trouble keeping
warm. Though it certainly wasn't raining as hard as it had been in
the city, Ebony could see an even darker set of storm clouds
rolling down from the mountains, like opaque mist over a river.
Which simply meant she was only likely to get colder.

She was mildly surprised that
Nate seemed to actually see, and note, her little shiver with a
bare smile. It wasn't a mean smile, or a triumphant one, it was
almost, almost kind. But then he ruined it:
“I bet you're regretting
wearing such a tiny little white dress,” he looked down at her
feet, his eyebrows dancing around in amusement. “And where the hell
are your shoes?”

She instantly put a finger up
to her lips.
“Shhh,” her tone was harsh, “don't use that word around
here – things might hear you.”

He leaned in, face still a
picture of sarcasm.
“You mean shoes?”

She mouthed
“Hell,” then shrugged. “Though
honestly, a little trip down there might do you some good – beat a
bit of manners and sense into you.”