Something Wicked (20 page)

I
went from hot to sickly cold in a split second.

My shirt was still bunched up under my arms, under my chin. My blood was still pounding. My breasts were still damp. And all from making out with
my sister’s killer?

“So sexy,” murmured Vic, ducking back down to me. “I’ve needed to do this for so long—”

And I knocked him across the head with my cast.

“Hell!”
If I’d had any lingering doubts, the way Victor Fisher reared up and backhanded me ended them. He drove my shoulders back into the dirt while my vision was still clearing, pinning me down. “Katie! What the fuck?”

“Get off me,
Victor!
”

His grin was a sneer. “But we’re not done yet.”

He loomed down for another kiss. When I strained my head away, writhing helplessly under his weight, he stuck his hot tongue in my ear and said, “Mmm.
Yummy.
”

He was stronger, heavier. He had twice the working hands I did. And the son of a bitch was ruthless….

But I was a witch.

A witch so drunk on all the eddies and undertows of power around here—not to mention so desperate for his brother—that I’d fallen into his trap in the first place, sure.

But I wasn’t exactly helpless.

I gathered energy like I might scoop water over myself, silently calling on the strength not only of Hekate, but any goddess worshippers who may have been here before me. That was a lot of strength. Then, with one desperate burst of power, I flung myself upward and slammed my forehead into his prominent nose.

I heard a crack on fleshy impact.

“Fuck!”
He recoiled, just off balance enough for me to roll out from under him. Magic, or coincidence?

Did it freaking
matter?

As dizzy from the head butt as the magic, I scrambled to get my feet under me.

His hand closed on my ankle, like a manacle, and he jerked me backward. I hit the dirt hard. An uneven rock sent a shriek of pain up my knee. But I kicked back at him, all the same. Again, I put every bit of magical power into it that I could. For every woman this place could remember being abused. For every woman this place could remember being attacked. For
every woman—

My foot connected with a hard thud. My technique wasn’t neat or graceful, but it worked; his grasp loosened on my ankle. I tried to pull free, almost had it. He grasped my shoe.

With a wrenching tug, I lost the shoe and ran, rocks poking hard through my sock on that foot.

Behind me, Vic loosed a mantra of swear words that could have been curses themselves. “You’re the one who bewitched me, you bitch! You brought this on yourself!”

I fumbled my shirt back down as I fled.

Before I had reached the front gate, a guard intercepted me. He wore a white shirt, a white hat, dark pants and a look of increasing concern. “You are Signorina Trillo,
sì?
”

Apparently, he’d thought Ben was overreacting when he’d declared me missing—until he saw me.

Everything got crazy after that. In the modest office near the front gate I reported Victor’s attack as just that, a simple attack. The guard got me an ice pack for my swollen cheek. The
polizia
were called in. Little police cars pulled up outside the gates, their foreign sirens screeching. At least six officers spread out to search the heavily wooded park. And after barely fifteen minutes, the kindly
poliziotto
who’d taken my abridged statement proudly announced that they’d captured my attacker.

This might be a goddess site, but could it be that easy?

The man they dragged back to the gate wore jeans and a maroon T-shirt, all right. He had curly black hair, too. The mingling of concern and frustration in his quick, dark eyes made him look more than a little maniacal.

But his shirt read University of Chicago. And when he saw me, he sagged with honest relief. “Katie!”

“Ben?” I surged forward—then slowed my step, hating this doubt his brother had planted. “Victor’s here, and he’s dressed almost exactly like you. Tell me something he wouldn’t know.”

Ben’s brows angled with hurt, then furrowed into acceptance. For a moment I was very afraid he’d choose something like,
you close your eyes when I kiss you.
I’d already tucked in my shirt and combed most of the leaves out of my hair, and I was just as glad to take some of my encounter with Victor to my grave. The sexual nature of his attack was one part of the story I’d abridged, along with the magic.

Luckily, Ben’s eyes followed some other invisible path of thought. He raised his gaze to me with taut decision. “You’re possessive about the cutlery.”

One of the first things he’d ever said to me.

I closed the gap between us and hugged him, then—incredibly glad. Incredibly guilty. How could I not have recognized the difference in their energies? Dizzy or not, why hadn’t I noticed all the distracting words his brother had used?

Ben couldn’t hug me back, what with the handcuffs, but he laid his cheek on my hair with a heavy sigh of relief. “Kate….”

The policemen started yelling.

Italian’s a lot more familiar to me than Greek, but I’ve still never learned the language. My grandparents—Pop and Nonna—had always been big on making the family “act American.” But I’d picked up enough to know that the cops thought I was lying.

It took us over an hour to set things straight—to get the original guard to identify Ben as the man who’d raised the alarm, to show them a picture from Ben’s wallet of the two brothers together, to protest that we really hadn’t filed a false report, despite the fact that I was now hanging off the man they’d thought was my attacker.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Ben murmured, more than once, during the lulls when the
poliziotti
yelled at each other instead of at us.

“I’m fine. Really.” I’d already put down the ice pack I’d been given for my cheek. And one of the guards had found me a replacement shoe—an oversized brown loafer—from their lost-and-found box.

Ben’s concern made me feel even worse for having mistaken his brother for him. I mean, the clues had been there all along. If Ben had rolled with me off a rock bench, I’d bet he would be sure to land first, to cushion my fall. Ben wouldn’t have put me at risk of arrest by suggesting sex in public in the first place. Hell, he probably…

Let’s face it. He probably wouldn’t have suggested sex at all. He would have waited for me to suggest it.

Damn it.

If I needed more proof of how doing dark magic had helped corrupt me, this was it. Because, Hekate help me, for that brief interlude before I’d realized Victor was Victor…

Had I honestly found him even close to as hot as Ben?

I watched Ben rub his wrists, scowling, now that the police had uncuffed him. And I did the only thing I could. I made excuses to myself. Some women blame their choice of sex partners on having been drunk? Well, I’d been OD’ing on an ancient energy that had distracted me, disoriented me, made me…

Wait.

Why wasn’t I dizzy anymore? I could still feel the energy of this place all around me and through me, like a sugar buzz. Just like when I’d gotten off the train, I knew beyond a doubt that the Hekate Chalice was here, so close it almost hurt not to be out finding it. But now that I was safe, now that it wouldn’t have made as big a difference, I didn’t feel drunk anymore.
Why not?

Unfortunately, that question would have to wait for a little more privacy.

The last of the search party returned to the park offices, and more yelling commenced. Ben leaned closer to me and translated, “They couldn’t find him.”

I’d kind of figured that much.

Clearly, to judge by the glares, the
poliziotti
were divided in their opinions of whether there had ever been a Victor. But the officer who’d first responded was polite enough to at least play along with our story.

“If he was in the park, he is not here now,” the
poliziotto
told us. And, since by now they must have communicated with Athens, “We will continue to search for him beyond the park boundaries. For now, please allow me to drive you safely back to your lodgings.”

Back to our lodgings? “But we haven’t been to the cave,” I protested. I was here to find a goddess cup!

For the good of women…and for the good of Ben.

The men exchanged incredulous looks and a few exclamations—I’d been attacked, as testified by my bruised cheek and still-missing shoe, and I wanted to sightsee?

The word “crazy”—
pazzesca
—got tossed around some. With a sharp glance in my direction, Ben joined the debate in careful Italian. He seemed to say something about how important this visit was to me. I heard the words
Antro della Sibilla.

“Yes, the Sibyl’s Cave,” I agreed. “I came here to see the
Antro della Sibilla.
We can leave after that.”

That caused more concern all around, including some gesturing at the clock—apparently the park would close in half an hour. But finally Ugo, the security guard who’d been so kind to me, agreed to give us a quick guided tour of the cave, just to be on the safe side.

On the one hand, if we actually found the Hekate Chalice, it would be hard to reclaim it around Ugo. No way would I be able to do any significant magic around him.

On the other hand…
security guard.
Psychotic killer wandering nearby. I really didn’t mind having Ugo along.

Ben continued to scowl, even after we left the police, though that didn’t keep him from taking my hand and keeping a tight hold on it. We headed down the wooded path and passed the steps toward the crumbling acropolis. That meant passing the bench where Victor and I had been….

Hello, guilt.

“Something really weird happened,” I murmured to Ben, speaking quietly in case Ugo’s English was better than I’d thought.

“Oh really?” Ben asked. Scowling. Okay, so he knew I’d been smacked upside the face. He’d been mistakenly held by police for the second time in two days, and the third time in just over a month. That
had
to be getting old. I reminded myself that this was Victor’s fault this time, not mine.

“While I was waiting for you to get our tickets, and Victor tricked me away? It’s like I couldn’t think clearly.” His dark gaze, when he slid it toward me, seemed dubious. “Really! It was like a buzzing in my head.”

Ugo paused by a sign that read
Antro della Sibilla,
with an arrow, and waved us down the correct path.

Ben looked grudgingly intrigued. “Buzzing. An electric discharge, maybe? Like standing near a generator?”

“Yeah. I thought it might have to do with this place.”

“There are a lot of theories about earth memory,” he agreed, and I felt myself relaxing as Ben eased into explanation. Well…relaxing as much as I could, with the knowledge that Victor could be anywhere around us, watching us. “In fact, it’s one of the more popular explanations for ghost sightings. The idea is that a location that’s seen an event of overwhelming hatred, or pain, or despair gets imprinted with those emotions, the way clothing picks up the scent of cigarette smoke. Places like Gettysburg, for example, or Culloden in Scotland are believed to still radiate the horrors of what happened there. So it’s no great leap to assume the same phenomenon for holy places. Notre Dame—”

“But it stopped,” I interrupted quickly, since Ugo was now waiting for us by a rock wall at the foot of the hill. “I mean, I can feel
something
now, but it’s not overwhelming me anymore.”

Ben considered this, then leaned close to whisper, “Did you use magic to get away from Vic?”

His breath on my ear made me shiver. I nodded.

“That may have released the charge. For lack of a better analogy, I mean. I don’t pretend to—”

“Antro della Sibilla.”
With a flourish to hurry us along, Ugo indicated a rock stairway down into the earth. Greenery hung over the ledge. Moss smeared the gray stone. And a rectangular opening at the bottom beckoned darkly.

I could feel something call to me from within, all the same. More magical pressure, throbbing, pulsing, waiting for me to reach it.

“Watch the step,” urged Ugo, gallantly taking the elbow of my cast arm as I slowly descended into the darkness. He was almost as old as my grandfather, but that didn’t make him any less Italian.

Taking a deep breath, as if I was about to submerge myself in water, I entered the Cave of the Sibyl.

It was…magical. More stone steps, so old that they dipped in the middle, slanted downward until the bottom. There, they crumbled into one extra big step and made a hairpin turn. That’s where the tunnel really got serious.

It was a lot more tunnel than it was cave.

“What’s this shape?” I asked, after Ben let go of my hand so Ugo could help me over the large bottom step.

Ben jumped easily to the tunnel floor beside me and whistled through his teeth. “Hexagonal? Sort of.”

A hexagon would be six sides, right? Flat on the bottom and top? Maybe if you took a hexagon and stretched the top half twice as high as the bottom half, maybe that would explain the methodical way these walls had been cut. Wooden poles stretched across the narrowing roof of the tunnel, maybe for support. Over them, like a natural skylight, a hole in the ground above us let in the sun. Farther down the tunnel, another doorway—also in the shape of a tall, skinny hexagon—beckoned deeper yet into the underground.

“Facilis descensus Averno,”
said Ugo, in the same kind of spooky voice old men might use to tell ghost stories.

I paused. “That’s not Italian.”

“Latin,” said Ben behind me, his voice echoing despite the openings above us. “It’s a quote from the
Aeneid
about this place. ‘The way to hell is easy.’”

Thanks a lot, Ugo.

Then again, if this really had been the way to hell—according to Virgil or Homer or whoever—it
was
easy. I’d been imagining the kind of caves that require climbing and ducking, not a path this straight. As we three continued on, the tunnel took on a dreamlike quality. At even intervals, more slits had been dug to the surface, so that the stone floor was intersected with stripes of natural light. It gave the impression of going on forever. The volcanic rock—
tufo,
Ugo called it—was soft beneath our feet. He showed us how easily it could be scraped off the wall, too, with his penknife.