Faith Hunter: Have Stakes Will Travel

The next morning Jane came into the Seven Sassy Sister’s Herb Shop and Café, and nearly cleaned us out of bacon, sausage, and pancakes. The appetite of that morning was because she had just changed back from an animal form and needed calories to make up for the shift, but I didn’t know that then. I just thought it was a crying shame that a woman who was so skinny could eat like that. If I tried to shovel in that much food, even half that much food, I’d weigh four hundred pounds. I think I gained three pounds just watching her eat, that first day.

And then the group of witch haters from the day before started picketing out front. I guess they were in town and figured they should make the most of it. They were carrying signs about not suffering a witch to live—the usual crappola—and chanting, “Save our children! Save our children!” Two cars pulled by and slowed, as if to turn in, and then pulled on away. Such attention was going to be damaging to business.

Jane paid her bill, went outside, and revved up her bike. And revved up her bike. And revved up her bike again. At which point I realized she was doing it on purpose. Then she did something to the engine, and revved it up again. And black smoke came out. So Jane rode in circles around the parking lot, shouting to the witch haters, “So sorry about the noise! I have engine problems!” After about ten minutes of noise, the witch haters left. It was so cool. I thought the twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, were going to have twin cows.

That’s Jane. A loner with a cause. Any cause, as long as it’s protecting someone.

She sneezed, bringing me back from my daydreams to my friend crawling around on the floor of a deserted, possibly haunted house.

The dining room had little floor left, and I could see the ground and the foundation beneath the house, between the struts. Still on her hands and knees, Jane moved into the foyer, circled its perimeter once, ignored the stairs leading to the second story, and crawled into the parlor beyond. I followed, watching from the foyer, which had been exposed when the construction crew pulled off the old boards covering the entrance. Oddly enough, though every other room in the house showed the results of men with mallets and hammers and crowbars, the parlor had still not been touched. The finish of the original handmade woodwork below the chair railing and the moldings at the ceiling were dark and filthy, the plaster between was cracked and split with water damage, and the last bits of old, red wallpaper curled, hanging loose, covered with spiderwebs and the dust of decades.

I stood in the six-foot-wide opening, watching my best friend track through the dust. The flooring beneath the accumulated filth was wood parquet, probably cut from the land the house stood on, milled by the lumber baron who built the house in the previous century. He had died a gruesome death, killed by a bear beside his train car, or so the old story went. His son had married a witch, and their daughter had inherited, and so had her daughter. However, the old house hadn’t been occupied in decades, not since Monique Ravencroft, the most powerful witch in the Appalachians, had disappeared without a trace.

The family had died out except for a son who no longer wanted the property, and the old house had been sold to a local lawyer for his business offices. Construction had begun quickly thereafter. The workers, however, had abandoned the project two days ago, after a flying mallet attacked a plumber standing in an empty room. The construction company owner had asked the local coven in the little township of Hainbridge to investigate, but the women had had no luck identifying the spiritual miscreant. They had called me in to discover if the troublemaker was a ghost, demon, or haint—haint being a term applied, in this part of the woods, to a form of poltergeist, or supernatural energy that usually manifests around a person instead of around a place. Whatever had attacked the plumber, it needed to be identified so the coven could coerce or force it to vacate the premises. Unfortunately, all I’d found was a sense of something dead in the house, and I’d had no luck calling to or talking to any non-corporeal would-be-killer. I hoped Jane, with her hyper senses, might discover something I had missed.

Jane sniffed around the fireplace on the far side of the room, the interior walls black with wood or coal smoke, the old grate rusted through and coated with spider webs. She seemed to find the opening uninteresting, and moved on to the corner. She paused there, repeating the openmouthed sniffing, and looked up, puzzled. “Molly, are you sure there’s something dead here?”

I nodded. I’m from a long family of witches, all of us pretty much in the witch-closet, and while I’m an earth witch, with the gift of growing plants, healing bodies, and restoring balance to nature, I’m a little unusual for an earth witch, in that I can sense dead things. And there was definitely something dead in this house somewhere.

“I smell witch and vamp,” Jane said.

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. “Vampire? There shouldn’t be a vampire here.”

“It’s been years, but I think…” She put her nose back to the dust covered floor, sniffed delicately, and started sneezing. She rolled to her feet and crossed the room, sneezing all the way, her nose buried in the crook of her elbow to keep her filthy hands away from her face. I counted twelve sneezes before she stopped and her face was red from the sneeze effort. “I think I smell vamp and witch together,” she said, the back of a wrist to her nose, pressing against more sneezes, “and both of them were bleeding.” She stood beside me and turned to face the room. The evidence of her crawling progression was a clear trail through the layers of dust.

“Moll,” she said, “I dropped a stake.” She pointed to the fourteen-inch-long stake in the corner. “Would you go get it, please?”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Why not? You chicken?”

Anger shot through me. “I’m not going—” I stopped, and the anger filtered out of me. Around me the house seemed to wait, expectant, and I turned in a slow circle, standing in the doorway, letting my senses flow out, seeing the hand-carved woodwork, the once-elegant stairs leading up to the second floor, the carpenter’s ladder against the wall. Smelling the dust, the fresh wood, the dirt under the house, and the sweat of the workers from two days past. Hearing the small sounds an old house makes, the pops and quiet groans. Feeling the breath of the house as air moved through it, cool and moist from the open floor and up the stairs, a faint trickle of breeze. I opened my mouth, as Jane did, and breathed, almost tasting the house, its age, elegance, and history.

Midway around, I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. The magic I hadn’t noted pricked against my skin, cool and light, old, old, old magic, a spell frayed around the edges, one that hadn’t been renewed in decades. “A ward,” I muttered, “combined with something else. Maybe a keep-away spell. Yeah. I can feel it, feel them both, combined. It was a really good one to have lasted this long.” I opened my eyes and studied Jane. “How’d you sense it when I didn’t?”

“Dust,” she said succinctly. At my puzzled expression, she said, “Every room in this place has been walked over, beaten on, knocked down, and partially renovated except this one. The footsteps all go right up to the entrance,” she pointed down to the floor at our feet, “where they removed whatever had been covering the room. And here they stop. I was the first person to so much as step into the room.”

A small smile pulled at her lips, half-proud, half-embarrassed. “I’m guessing the spell treated me like a big-cat. And since hanging around you and Big Evan so much, I’ve realized that sometimes I can feel witch magics. Cool and sparkly on my skin.”