Faith Hunter: Have Stakes Will Travel

At dusk, Evan and I entered the house, Jane behind us. I knew she had other things to do—tonight was belly-dance class—but here she was, curious as any cat. And she had brought a cooler with colas, iced tea, and sandwiches, two battery-operated lights, a first aid kit, and a bedroll. She was dressed for business in heavyweight denim jeans with stakes and blades strapped on her waist and thighs. When she saw me staring at the pile of supplies and at her silver-plated knives she shrugged. “Insurance, not that I expect to need any of it.”

Evan, who was carrying a basket filled with candles, a batch of dried herbs, and a small camp stove for heating water, just nodded. “Good thinking. Glad to have you watching our backs.”

It was the first time Evan had shown open approval of Jane, and she ducked her head to hide a pleased smile. I decided they were going to play nice, letting me concentrate on the seeing spell Evan and I had settled on. The math of any spell was hard—altering physical laws by will and intent was a job fraught with danger and the likelihood of mistakes. A loss of concentration, a stray worry, and everything could fall apart—or blow up, which was rare, but a lot more scary.

First thing I did was to damp-mop the foyer, concentrating on the area of floor directly in front of the parlor. Then, while the floor dried, I cleansed the house with a stick of burning dried sage. Once the house was cleansed I asked Jane, “Did you remember to bring your shirt?”

She lifted her brows and handed me a Ziploc bag with her filthy T-shirt from the day before. “You gonna tell me why you need my dirty laundry?”

“I’m going to shake the dust into a bowl and give it back.”

“Least you could do is wash it first,” she grumbled. At my expression she lifted a shoulder and added, “Just sayin’.”

I shook my head and drew a circle about five feet across on the wood floor with white chalk and set a cut crystal bowl in the center. I filled it with bottled water and put the empty in my bag. Using a compass, Evan set new, white, pillar candles inside the circle at the cardinal points, and draped silver crosses around each. Outside, it was getting dark, making it very hard to see in the foyer. No electricity would be used tonight. Jane sat on the bottom step out of the way, her knees drawn up and her arms around her ankles, as Evan lit the candles. I stepped into the circle and closed it with the piece of chalk. Evan backed away toward Jane and set the candle at magnetic north, which was to my left side and back a bit, the parlor opening facing east.

This was to be my ritual tonight, because as an earth witch, my magics were closest to the green magics of the spell we were trying to get a good look at. Evan, an air witch, could only offer support. I gathered my white dress close and sat behind the bowl, cross-legged, the bowl of water between my knees. I opened the plastic bag and held Jane’s shirt over the bowl, shaking it gently, steadily. Dust from the parlor sprinkled onto the still surface of the water. I balled the shirt back up and sealed it into the bag, tucking it under my knee.

Satisfied, I nodded to Evan. From the bag he had carried, he lifted a silver bell with no clapper and the silver mallet that was used to ring it. He also brought out his father’s old, leather-bound Bible—the book Old Man Trueblood had been holding when he was accepted into the church and baptized, when he married, when each of his children were born, and when he died. I wasn’t much of a religious person—nowhere near as spiritual as Jane—but even I knew this book had power.

I took a deep breath and exhaled, repeating the clarifying exercise twice more to settle myself. Everything I did tonight would be in threes. I closed my eyes and nodded to Evan. As I opened my mouth he rang the bell, the clear, pure tone and my words overlapping each time I said the word bell. “Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle.” The three tones seemed to ring on, echoing through the empty house, and continued, three times more with the first word of the next three lines. “Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now.”

I opened my eyes, and without pausing went on into the next three lines, knowing that Evan had the cadence now and would keep up with me, ringing the bell with each first word, even though the method of lines was changing.

“Time of warding. Time of blood. Time of attack.

“Time of betrayal. Time of undead. Time of change.

“Time of vampire. Time of transference. Time of death.”

I fell silent, the bell chimes shimmering through the empty house. As the last tone faded, the water between my knees seemed to brighten. And so did the floor of the parlor. In the far corner where the stethoscope had rested for so long, a soft green glow spiraled up, a mist full of light. Close to the opening of the foyer where the stethoscope rested now, a twin, green, featherlike luminosity rose like smoke, twining and twisting. The mist rose from the floor like smoke, meeting the stained ceiling overhead, pooling against the high corners before spreading and reaching slowly toward the center of the room, overhead. Both tendrils reached the center at the same instant and touched, tentative, like delicate green fingers of budding desire.

A single fixture appeared in the center of the ceiling, an old-fashioned electric ceiling light, bright in the dimness. The magical light of the spell merged with the old light and with its other half and curled back on itself, undulating across the ceiling, to brighten the room, revealing furnishings as they had once been. Where the milky light fell down, back to the floor, tendrils twirled and danced and revealed a moment out of time.

But this scene was not like any time-spell I had ever seen. It wasn’t misty or uncertain, no dreamlike underpinnings or unfinished supports. It was crisp and clear and certain, full of sharp edges. This was not the result of a seeing spell. This was something different, something I had never seen before.

I had been wrong. The spell tied to the stethoscope wasn’t finished. The spell had, instead, created some kind of bizarre bubble universe, a pocket universe, a part of real time, sectioned off, sealed away from the world the rest of us knew, or maybe looping around and around over and over again.

Light blossomed out, opening like a flower in a segment of high-speed photography, to display the room as it had once been. The walls were wallpapered a deep blood-rose shade. The furniture was from the late nineteen-thirties or forties with a velvet upholstered couch in a vibrant wine shade against the far wall, a wheeled tea tray before it, a teapot wrapped in a quilted cozy. Wing chairs were aligned to catch the heat from the fire burning merrily in the fireplace. A card table stood in one corner and a bookshelf across from it. An old-fashioned phonograph, the windup kind with an ornate brass horn, was on a side table, and a squeaky song came from it, a man’s voice sounding hollow, yet inordinately cheery.

A woman sat in a wing chair, a basket of yarn at her feet, a steaming teacup on a side table. She was small with dark-auburn hair, dressed in a robe in a deep shade of navy, over a white nightgown. She was knitting with blue yarn that trailed up from a basket with large skeins, the pile of finished garment on her far side. She seemed to hear a noise and looked up, turning. Her eyes widened, mouth opened. A form fell upon her, the pop of vampiric speed sounding in the room like a gunshot. It was a child, dressed in dark pants and nothing else, his skin the dead-white of the three-day-dead. The vampire child, small but unnaturally strong, leaped, grabbed up the woman and spun her in her chair. She screamed, fear and pain in the harsh note.