Mark of the Witch (8 page)

She might as well have worn a flashing neon sign proclaiming
herself a witch. It wasn’t a habit he’d noticed in her before, and it sort of
belied her claim that she’d become an atheist. Maybe she just felt safer,
wearing the symbols of her former faith.

The looks they were getting as they sat at their booth, she in
her pentacles, he in his collar, were almost funny. A priest and a witch, having
breakfast together. Indira ended up devouring a stack of Belgian waffles and an
omelet, washing every other bite down with creamy coffee, and claiming she would
quit caffeine again when life returned to normal. He only picked at his own
pancakes.

He was too tense to eat, and not only because she was proving
to be the biggest test his faith had ever undergone.

Of course, he’d been in a crisis of faith for a while now. And
all of this was making him wonder if he’d made the right decision. Because if
this was real, after all—if Dom’s obsession turned out to be true…

But this wasn’t the time to ponder those things. That would
come later.

Right now, he was about to face a demon. Maybe the devil
himself. With a witch as his only ally, a witch who didn’t know—or did she?—that
she was that demon’s friend. Either way, that alliance made her Tomas’s
enemy.

It seemed unnecessarily risky to take her so near the Portal,
since allegedly the demon couldn’t pass through without her help. But Dom said
it was worth the risk. That she had to be there to help Tomas destroy the demon
for good.

He’d trained for this, he’d studied, he knew what had to be
done, but that was all back when he thought the whole thing was just an old
man’s crazy fantasy. But now it was here, real and present. And complicating
things further, in all his thoughts on this very topic, he had never counted on
liking the woman.

He looked up at her. Sipping her coffee, eyes closed, thick
lashes resting on those high-boned cheeks, skin like a ripe peach. He was drawn
to her and felt an unbelievable urge to touch her at every opportunity.

She burped, interrupting his thoughts. Her hand flew to her
mouth, and her eyes went huge. “Well, that was polite,” she said. “Excuse me.”
Her cheeks were pink with embarrassment, her smile self-deprecating.

She was charming the socks off him, he thought.

He glanced at her plate. Empty. She ran her forefinger through
the syrup on the edge and popped it into her mouth, and he clenched his jaw to
keep from groaning out loud. “God, that was good,” she said.

“Glad you enjoyed it.”

“You eat like a bird, Father Tomas.”

“Not normally. Got a lot on my mind.”

“Ow!” She gripped her arm again, then frowned and lowered her
hand.

“Are you going to let me take a look at that?”

“There’s nothing to look at.”

He tipped his head to one side. “Clearly, it hurts. You keep
grabbing it, then quickly letting go.”

“And just as quickly putting it out of my mind. It only hurts
if I think about it, so I wish you’d stop reminding me.”

“Sorry. It won’t happen again.” He picked up the check their
waitress had dropped, and rose from his seat. “Are you ready?”

The bubbly mood she’d been emanating seemed to burst. Back to
reality, he thought. She really was dreading what lay ahead. “Yes. All ready.”
She got up, too, snatching her mug off the table and taking one last gulp before
hurrying to the counter with him. She tugged on his sleeve and said, “Restroom”
in a stage whisper. He nodded and tried not to watch her as she walked away.

* * *

The restroom was deserted. Perfect. I needed privacy,
big-time. ’Cause something
was
going on with my arm,
despite my denials to Tomas.

God he was good-looking. And funny. And interesting. So okay,
he believed in demons and a fairy tale grimmer than anything the Grimm Brothers
could have come up with.
And he’s a priest. Don’t forget
that minor detail.
But no one was perfect.

I pulled off my jacket, wincing as it peeled down over my right
arm, then, turned my shoulder toward the big mirror.

My blood rushed straight to my feet, leaving me so damn dizzy I
almost fell over. My arm looked as if it had been hacked by a mini-madman with a
tiny blade. Little cuts crisscrossed my flesh like a road map, and blood had run
everywhere. The inside of my favorite jacket must be soaked in it. Ruined.

Damn it all, Past Self, if you want me to
bail on this whole harebrained road trip, you just keep fucking with
me.

I looked up at my own face in the mirror, but someone else was
looking back at me. Not a pale-faced dirty blonde with a killer sense of style,
but a copper-skinned woman with thick black hair hanging long and wavy, heavy
brows in desperate need of tweezing, and black, black eyes.

And behind her—no, behind me—stood another woman with similar
coloring but a totally different face.

Lilia.

I ought to turn around, see if she’s
really standing there. I really should.

Too bad I was too scared to move.

She stared at me in the mirror, then suddenly shouted,
“Remember, Indira!”

After jumping out of my skin, I yelled right back at her.
“Remember
what,
for cryin’ out loud!”

“I’ll
make you
remember!” I sort of
heard her say inside my head. Then she lifted a big curved blade that glinted in
the fluorescent restroom lights as she swung it down to carve me up some
more.

That was enough to end my paralysis. I spun around, screaming
at the top of my lungs. But there was no one behind me.

Before I could even sigh in relief, though, I heard the hissing
sound of the invisible blade as it cut the air, and something slashed across my
chest. I felt it slicing my flesh, saw the gaping cut opening up like a zipper,
saw the blood flowing out of me as I sank to the floor in pain. In terror.

5

T
he door crashed open, and then Tomas was
bending over me. “Indy. Indy, it’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here. I’ve got
you.” His big hand cupped my head, lifting it slightly off the floor as the
other one ran over my hair. Wait staff and a customer or two crowded in the
doorway to see what was going on, though Tomas’s frame mostly blocked me from
their view.

Turning their way, he said, “Leave us for a moment, okay? She’s
had an accident, and I want to get her cleaned up.”

“I’ll call nine-one-one,” a waitress—our waitress, I
realized—offered.

“I don’t think it’s that bad. Let me check her over first, all
right?”

“Do you need any—”

“We’re fine,” he barked in a tone I’d never heard him use
before. But it did the trick. The onlookers backed out, and the door swung
closed.

Tomas quickly turned his attention back to me. He snatched
handfuls of paper towels from the dispenser, soaked them beneath the tap and
returned, patting my chest with the icy wet towels. The cold made me gasp and
look down. My T-shirt was torn in two, laid open to reveal a long slash across
my chest. The blade had sliced my bra dead center, and it gaped, exposing more
of me than I liked. Both breasts, almost entirely bare, the bra’s lacy cups
barely clinging to either side. My eyes shot back to his, but he was intent on
patting the blood away from my chest.

“It’s not deep, thank God.”

I winced at every touch, though he was being gentle. He
straightened and then lifted me up and sat me gently on the counter with all the
sinks. I had to part my knees so he could get close enough to mop up the blood
from my arms, and the feel of him standing there between them was so damn
intimate that I noticed it, even amid all the pain and blood.

And fear. I’d never felt so near death as I had when I’d seen
that blade flashing down at me. Except in the dreams.

“What happened?” he asked, stepping away long enough to soak a
fresh handful of towels.

“I—I—I…”
Why the hell won’t my mouth
work?

His gaze snapped to mine, and instead of wiping away more of
the blood, as I was expecting, he reached around me to lay the fresh batch on
the back of my neck. I tipped my head forward, closed my eyes.

“It’s all right now. I’m going to wash the rest of the blood
away, okay? Are you ready?”

“It hurts.”
God, I sound like such a
baby.

“I know, Indy. I know. I’ll be careful.” He got the towels so
wet they were dripping, and squeezed the cool water over the cuts on my arms. I
covered my breasts with one arm while he took care of the other, and then
switched sides. I tried not to look at the injuries but couldn’t stop the tears
that burned past my tightly closed lids. Even the trickles of cold water hurt.
Finally he tossed the wet towels aside and used his cupped hands to do the
job.

“You know how you were telling me the more you think about
pain, the worse it is?”

I nodded, the motions jerky, my eyes stinging.

“Well, focusing on something good works even better. So I want
you to try that for me. Think about something good, okay?”

“I’ll try.” I thought for a minute, and then I almost smiled a
little.

“Got something?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You just keep focusing on that, all right? Whatever it
is, just—”

“It’s you,” I whispered.

Tomas went very still. I lifted my head to meet his eyes.

“You’re like some kind of superhero, you know that? The way you
came busting in here, the way you’re trying to take care of me, like I’m the
helpless female. Normally that would piss me off, but you do it in a way that
doesn’t. And you’re cover-model gorgeous, too. So I…” I shrugged and let my
voice trail off.

He sighed and returned to rinsing away the blood.

“I looked in the mirror, Tomas, and I wasn’t me. I was someone
else. And there was this other woman standing behind me, yelling at me to
remember, and then she was slashing me with a blade. Only she wasn’t there. No
one was there, but it kept on cutting.” My voice broke, and I couldn’t speak
anymore.

Tomas caught my chin in his hands and nodded at my arm. “She
wasn’t just cutting you. She was writing something. Look.”

I was afraid to look, but I did it anyway. I turned slightly on
the counter, checking out my arm in the big mirror behind me. The blood was
mostly gone, and the new trickles seemed to have stopped, so the shapes of the
cuts were evident. Symbols had been carved into my flesh, odd, ancient-looking
symbols that I knew, somehow, were words, letters, writing of some kind. The
cuts in my skin weren’t deep. They’d bled, and they’d hurt like hell, as if the
blade had been hot. But the burning pain was already fading.

“What does it say?” I asked in a whisper.

“I have no idea.” Then he blinked. “They’re disappearing,
they’re healing, just like the marks of the whip did.”

“Wait,” I said, wondering if the other mark had returned, as
well. I lifted my shirt in back, looking over my shoulder into the mirror. Sure
enough, the tattoo was there, just like before, and fading fast.

He patted his pockets in search of his phone but came up empty.
“I left my cell in the car. We need to get photographs before they’re gone
entirely. Do you—”

I nodded at my gorgeous jacket, lying discarded on the floor,
and he quickly picked it up, searching the pockets. He came up with my
BlackBerry and fumbled around trying to find the camera function. By the time he
did, and aimed it at my lower back, the marks had vanished, so he tried to
capture the ones on my arms, but they’d faded to pale pink welts, crisscrossing
my skin.

He snapped a shot or two as I tried to hold the sliced edges of
my T-shirt together to cover my boobs, then he gave up and shook his head.
“Gone. As if they were never there.”

“Wish the bloodstains inside my jacket would disappear that
easily,” I muttered. “Bitch ruined my leather.”

He bent and picked up the jacket, turned the sleeves inside out
and easily tore the ruined lining out, then tossed it into the garbage. Using
more wet paper towels, he wiped the remaining blood from the leather and then
handed the jacket to me.

I’d slid off the counter by then but was none too steady on my
feet. And there was blood all over the floor.

“I’m going to clean this place up,” he told me as I pulled the
jacket on and zipped it up. “I want you to go to the car and wait for me. Let
the staff know you’re all right, and that they’ll have their restroom back
momentarily. Don’t answer any questions, just let them see that you’re fine.
Okay?”

I nodded, a little surprised by this take-charge, give-orders,
lay-down-the-law side of him. I hadn’t seen it before.

It was sexy as hell.

I stared at him for a long moment as he washed the blood from
the floor. When he felt my eyes on him, he stopped and looked up at me.

Say something, dumb-ass. Don’t just stand
here giving him cow-eyes.
“Thank you, Tomas. I mean…really.
Thanks.”

“De nada.”

* * *

As soon as we took off again, Tomas asked if I was ready
to hear the rest of the story, to hear about my mission. I was proud of myself
for looking him square in the eye and saying, “No. I’m ready to hear some old
school rock and roll and not much else, if that’s cool with you.”

He gave an uncertain nod, and I flipped on the radio and found
a classic rock station. We didn’t speak again for what felt like hours.

Leaning my aching head back against the seat, I watched the
world around us change as he drove. The city fell farther and farther behind,
and in no time we were passing through farmland, beneath a crystal-blue sky with
barely a cloud in sight. The hills got bigger the farther we went, and brighter,
too. We were heading north, into foliage country, and we passed some
breathtakingly vivid displays. And then they started to fade a little. Farther
north, the leaves had passed their peak. A few bare limbs at first, then more,
and then mostly.

With vintage Aerosmith providing the soundtrack, I could almost
have been anticipating a cheerful day in the country.

Except that I wasn’t. I was heading toward a showdown with some
kind of demon. A real demon. Right?

“Or maybe I’m in a psych ward right now, tripping out on
Thorazine and all of this is just a big complex hallucination.”

“What’s that?” Tomas asked, glancing sideways at me.

Damn, he’s so good-looking.

I shook my head. “Nothing, it’s all good.”

Eventually, we were heading through New York’s wine country,
and soon after, entering Ithaca. The view on one side was of the campus of
Cornell University, sitting high above the tiny city like a crown jewel. On the
other, the real jewel, Cayuga Lake, glistening in the late-autumn sun, its
mirrorlike surface reflecting the remaining foliage so powerfully that it made
me gasp out loud in pure pleasure.

“God, it’s beautiful here. It must have been amazing a couple
of weeks ago.”

“This is one of my favorite places on the planet. I attended
Cornell.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He nodded. “And I have a friend there I’d like to contact.
Professor Jonathon Yates. He might be able to help us translate the writing that
appeared on your arm. If the photos came out, that is. Have you looked at
them?”

I blinked down at my cell phone, which I’d dropped on the seat
between us. “No.” And I didn’t reach for it to do so now.

“You know, avoiding what’s happening isn’t going to make it go
away.”

I shrugged. “How do you know unless you let me try?” I was only
half joking.

His brows furrowed. He was still trying to figure me out. I
don’t suppose I was easy. The worse things got, the more jokes I made. The
scarier things were, the more I pretended they didn’t exist. If I could chuck it
all right now and head to Disney World, I’d do it in a New York minute.

“Okay,” he said at length. “Okay, I got you. For now, keep
pretending we’re just taking a nice drive in the country. I’ll check the photos
when we get to the cabin.”

“Cabin?”

“Yeah, I have a place here. Just a dozen or so miles from town,
around the southern tip of the lake.”

I frowned at him. “You bought a place near this so-called
Portal on purpose?”

“I bought it before I knew about the Portal. Dom said it was
divine guidance. I suppose that’s more likely than coincidence.”

“So how did you find out the Portal was here?”

“Ah, that’s Dom’s department. Astrology, ley lines, magnetic
fields.” He ran his hand, palm flat, past the top of his head. “I never was very
good at that end of things,” he said with a smile.

I smiled back at him. I couldn’t help it. I was starting to
really like this guy. “How far?” I asked.

“Not far.”

It wasn’t far, not at all. Within minutes he was turning from a
side road onto a narrow dirt driveway that seemed to go on forever. It meandered
uphill, under a tunnel-like canopy of intertwined bare limbs with a few
Technicolor leaves still clinging. The road was coated in their fallen comrades
and looked like a painting crew’s drop cloth: gold and sun-yellow, rust and
scarlet, purple and burgundy, rose and mustard. Sunlight made its way through
the branches overhead and dappled everything in brilliance. We bumped over a
wooden bridge with a swift-running stream only a few feet below it and then back
into the tunnel of trees.

Finally the driveway spilled into a wider space that fronted a
house straight out of a dark fairy tale. Cobblestone, with dark wood shutters,
window boxes filled with orange and yellow marigolds, and an arching front door
made of wide, darkly stained boards. Behind the house, and far, far below it,
Cayuga Lake glistened, reflecting the bare-limbed forest and splotches of color
like a big stained-glass window in the sunlight.

“It looks like a storybook—but a scary storybook. ‘Grimm’s
Grimmest.’”

“I think it’s charming. What’s so scary about it?”

I shrugged and got out of the car. He got out, too. Nothing
really, I thought. There were no gargoyles, no dead plants, no cobwebs or dusty
windows. “I don’t know. But it feels scary to me.”

“Well, you’ve been through a lot of scary stuff in the past few
days. I guess that must be why.”

“Yeah.” I stood on the ground staring at the house. “That must
be why.” But I didn’t believe it. As I walked toward the place, I got the
creepiest feeling up the back of my neck. As if someone was watching me. But
when I looked around to see who, there were only rows of towering maples that
spread away from the drive and surrounded the cottage. A little hardwood forest
in between me and the road out of here.

I rubbed my arms and looked again at the house. “So is this
fairy-tale cottage like…sitting right on top of the local Hellmouth, then?”

“No. I promise, the Portal is not under my house. I don’t know
where it is, exactly, just that it’s near. That’s one of the reasons I need
you—you’re going to help me find it.”

“Right.”

“Would you like to go inside now?”

I looked at the house again, braced my spine and swallowed my
fear. “If you insist,
Padre.
”

* * *

In his dark world, the demon felt it. The priest was
near, and in the company of the witch who held the key to his return. It was
happening, just as he had always known it would, though he no longer knew how he
had come by the knowledge. He remembered nothing but darkness and hate. He
yearned for nothing but vengeance and blood.

And freedom. Freedom from this prison.

His anger had grown over the years. His hatred had festered. He
would take that witch and force her to give him the key. He didn’t know what
form it would take, but he knew she had it.