Stacia Kane - Unholy Magic

And they were feeding. Even if the house wasn’t already sucking her energy away, the birds were. It was getting harder to hold them, harder to see, harder to move. She needed help. Needed someone who could share some power. Oliver. He had power and he would know how to help, right?

She had no idea what was happening in the hall, if the men were still there, if they had succumbed to the house’s thrall. Feathery wings battered her face, her bloody arm, her legs, as she fought her way through the flock and back to the hall, her nostrils dry and caked with dust.

Hands grabbed her, spun her around. She screamed. Her fist connected with solid bone. Oliver, holding his nose, glared at her. Only the whites of his eyes were clearly visible.

No time to apologize. “The house is protecting them!” she shouted. “It’s a spirit house, we have to break it.”

He nodded. Blackmailer or no, she really owed him something after this.

His hot, sticky hand grabbed hers, forming a skin connection. Through it she felt his power slip into her body and meld with hers. The darkness before her eyes cleared. Her muscles responded.

Together they moved forward. The heart of the house, the seat of the spell. That’s what she needed to find. Vaguely she knew Terrible’s and Lex’s men were following them, felt Lex at her side with his knife ready.

A shape appeared before them, forming itself from the air. Vanita. Her pale skin glowed in the darkness, too perfect for life. Her figure in its black dress disappeared in the black fog. She was all around them, filling them. Impossible to escape, no chance, just give up …

Pain exploded in her torn arm. Her head snapped up to see Oliver’s face inches from hers. Had he punched her? Fucker.

He was right, though. This was not the time to give up. Blood dripped down the fingers of her free right hand as she reached into her bag, found the herbs and dirt she still carried. This wouldn’t be enough, and she knew it; somehow Vanita was connected to the house as well, and she would not be sent to the City until the house’s spell was broken.

But if Chess could freeze her, slow her down, steal some of her power, they had a chance.

“Arcranda beliam dishager!” Chess flung the graveyard dirt at that smug, glowing face, followed it with ajenjible and powdered crow’s bone, and grabbed her Ectoplasmarker from her pocket. Ready.

Vanita did not disappear, but she faltered. It was enough. Behind her Chess saw what she needed. A doorway, one from which darkness radiated, one that made her legs weak. That was where they needed to be, she knew it.

She dared to look away long enough to find Terrible, little more than a hulking shape in the shadows. “The door,” she told him. “Break the door.”

He nodded.

She flung herself forward, into Vanita. Icy cold ripped her breath from her lungs; evil stole her sight. She faltered, blind, rummaging around inside a ghost, certain at any moment she would fall. She would be lost, lost forever, lost in the endless darkness …

I am already lost . The words shouldn’t have given her strength, but they did. There was nothing this bitch could do to her that hadn’t already been done, nowhere lower she could go. She turned the thought into a mantra, let those negative words and images she tried so hard to forget flow free through her mind, and found her skin warming again and the darkness falling away and she saw Terrible battering at the door, throwing his huge body against it again and again. The frame buckled; the walls groaned. Her skin, her tattoos, vibrated as the spell weakened.

Vanita watched, too, and in that moment when she was distracted Chess took her chance. Vanita’s body was translucent, but her hands were solid; Chess used her Ectoplasmarker to scribble the passport she’d designed earlier to direct her psychopomp onto that spectral hand, completing it just as Vanita noticed and yanked herself away with a wail.

Too late.

Terrible crashed through the door. Foulness poured through the open frame, thick greenish-black, choking.

Her knife seemed to jump into her palm. She pulled energy from Oliver, from the air, from the well of blazing anger in her soul, and entered the room.

The house roared; she felt it shake through her entire body. She ignored it. Ignored, too, the fight taking place behind her, around her, as Vanita struggled to stop her. Ignored her terror that Kemp would show up any second and kill her. Oliver moved, his hand still in hers, but his voice just a rumble in the general din. She didn’t have much time.

Runes decorated the floor, wall to wall. Terrible had already come in contact with some of them; she felt them burn through the soles of her shoes.

“ Baredia lachranta. Baredia lachranta emplorascum . By my power I command it.” The wound in her left palm still bled; she gritted her teeth and deepened it, increasing the flow. Her blood sizzled and spat when it touched the boards at her feet.

“Baredia lachranta resticatum.”

The floor shook. It was working. Working, but not fast enough. Her knees hit the rune-covered wood, now wet with her blood. She dug the point of her knife in, started carving over the runes and symbols as she spoke their names aloud: “Ashtaroth, septikosh, higam, spadirost.”

Vanita screamed. Chess’s blood kept spreading over the floor, sinking into the gouges she made. It wasn’t enough, she didn’t have enough. Oliver’s face was pale beside her, his hand shaking in hers. He was almost empty, it was hard for her to breathe, she needed more power—

She still had the birds. They’d be furious, but she had them, and she was going to use them. Wild feathers filled her mind, her body. She shook with them, unsure for a minute if she was still human, but their energy coursed through her, and she saw something—something squirming in the corner of the room.

A cat. A dead cat, swarming with maggots. The spell’s sacrifice, its rotted flesh feeding the magic, hidden by a visual glamour until she’d weakened the spell enough to fade it out. Rational Chess was disgusted; the rest of her simply saw it, knew what needed to be done.

She lunged forward, lifted her knife, and drove it into the corpse, shrieking with fury and power and fear. With a tremendous echoing groan—Chess felt it all the way to her toes—the spell broke.

The birds screamed, swooping through the air with new purpose. From the rooms came the shouts of the zombie men, angry their prizes had been stolen from them, or relieved to be free, or both—she couldn’t tell and didn’t care. All she knew was she had a job to do.

She yanked her own psychopomp from her bag, set the skull on the ground, and took up a handful of the dirt from Vanita’s grave. “I call on the guardians of the City of the Dead. I call on the escorts. Aid me; collect this soul from where it does not belong.”

There was too much magic in the air already; the psychopomp formed from the skull in an instant, roaring and leaping from the floor. Chess jumped back, turned around to see Vanita trying to run away. She threw the dirt.

“Vanita Tailor, I command you to return to your place of silence. By my blood I command it, by my power I command it. I call on the escorts of the City of the Dead to take you there, and it shall be done!”

Vanita tried to run but couldn’t. The dirt trapped her, held her, until the great black dog leapt up and caught her dress in its teeth.

Through the fog and the smoke Chess watched Vanita shrink, watched her being dragged through the hole. It closed around her, around them, the skull rattling back to the floor, the magic releasing in a breath-sucking rush.

For a minute they all stood staring at one another in the waiting silence.