Trio of Sorcery (3 page)

Once she reached the grave site itself, she put down the bag of tools she was carrying in her right hand, and shifted the sledgehammer she had been carrying in her left into both hands. It was as heavy a hammer as she could manage to swing. Memaw had suggested it. “Some people would leave the headstone, but since there isn't anyone going to notice out there, I say, be sure.” Di had agreed, and together, the two of them had made plans to consecrate it.

Lightning flashed as she swung the sledgehammer grimly over her head, and thunder boomed just as she hit the stone.

She didn't think it was coincidence.

When the flash and boom repeated with each of the next three blows, she became sure that it wasn't coincidence—
and given the surge of energy she felt each time she hit the headstone, she was also sure that whatever was in control of the lightning was also on her side. She wasn't a weakling…but she wasn't all that strong either, and the granite headstone shouldn't be shattering the way it was, like a Hollywood rock in a movie about chain gangs. With exactly nine blows, the marker was obliterated, no piece any larger than a quarter.

Di reached into her bag and pulled out the shaker jar of consecrated salt. Ordinary salt would do, according to the grimoire, but as Memaw said, why take chances? Sheltering the jar from the rain so the salt wouldn't clump and clog the holes in the top, she shook the jar vigorously and coated the fragments and rubble of the headstone with the salt.

Nothing happened when she did that, but she hadn't expected anything to. The real fight was about to start.

She was soaked to the skin despite her raincoat, her hair was plastered flat to her head, and it was a good thing she'd tied it back hard or she'd never have been able to see. The miasma roiled in protest, rising up in waves that threatened, but did not actually wash over her. Dear gods, it was freezing—much colder than it should have been. It was a cold she knew; she'd felt it before around ghosts. What was new was the fury she felt directed against her, like a blizzard wind, ice-edged and lethal.

She put the sealed jar back down in her bag. She was going to need it again in a while. Then she took out the shovel.

Bloody hell, I don't know why they didn't issue me with a little Guardian ditchdigger while they were giving me the rest of it.
…

This time there were no timed rumblings in the heavens when she took the first shovelful. Once again, though, it was as surprisingly easy to dig as it had been to shatter the headstone. This wasn't like moving heavy soil loaded with rain, it was more like shoveling sand at the beach. Maybe they weren't giving her a little work crew of her own, but at least they were helping. Whoever
they
were.

The rain pounded on her head and the black fog circled her, hating her, but still unable to touch her. Di figured that since no one had come after this thing before, and it had never encountered opposition, it wasn't sure what to do about her. She wasn't one of the ones that had been cursed—but she was marked as the woman's protector. The rules had been abruptly changed, and it didn't yet know how to react.

While she worked, she talked. She had very little expectation that the revenant was going to listen to her, but hey, it was worth a shot. No matter that she could hardly hear herself over the thunder, the revenant would hear her no matter what was going on. It didn't have a choice in the matter.

“I understand why you're angry,” she said, punctuating each word with a shovelful of dirt. She was already knee-deep in the grave, and very glad that she was used to a certain amount of physical labor.
Never thought I would be
grateful to Memaw for making me chop all that firewood.
…“Silas Macreedy was a horrible, horrible man. I am sure that he is in some version of hell, and he deserves to be there.” She dug into the sides, lengthening the hole and making it wider. “He preyed on you and your family in every way possible. There was no excuse for what he did. In a fair and just world, he would have been caught and punished. I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it was for you, to see what he did to them, and as for what he did to you—well, I'll be honest with you, I'd have shot him too.”
Of course, it wasn't just that you shot him. It was that you served as his guide out into the woods, then shot his ankles, then spent three days torturing him before you killed him. On the other hand, I can't really blame you too much. He was a beast.
She put her intent behind the words. Maybe, just maybe, that would get through to the revenant. “His son was just as bad. Even after all that came out, you got no justice at all. The Macreedy family used their money and influence to get you hung, to discredit everything you said. They managed to sweep everything Silas had done under the rug and a death curse is exactly what they deserved.”

The miasma didn't seem mollified.

“But only the first generation. That was punishment enough. Your curse ruined them, they all died in painful, awful ways, and no one who was responsible for what happened to your family escaped. But it should have ended there. The second generation was more honest, and before he died, Everett Macreedy told his wife and children
what had happened and charged them with making it up to your family. That's where it should have ended.”
Why punish the innocent? That's like the Mirror Curse, left on someone when you know you won't be there to take it off if things go too badly. Only much worse.

“You shouldn't have continued the vendetta past them. Not like this. Brenda didn't even know she was a Macreedy until she found an honest psychic. She never did anything to you or yours. She is a good woman. How can you blame her for simply having the misfortune to be born to an idiot who vanished on her mother? I've looked into every nook and cranny of her life, and she has never been anything but a good person. There's no one left of your family to make further atonements to. You have to stop now.”

The digging really was going faster than it should have. Then again, the hard part was yet to come. She'd been afraid as she got deeper that the walls of the hole she was digging would collapse in on her, or that she'd be digging in a rapidly deepening pool of mud and water, but the earth stayed firm and the water drained away, leaving her with wet dirt under her feet. The hole was waist-deep now.

“Six feet” was the prescribed depth of a grave, but not in this soil. Bedrock was only four feet down, which was good, since her kit bag was on the side of the grave and she would be able to reach inside easily. She'd hit the coffin soon—

Her shovel scraped along something that sounded hollow.

And that was when the miasma came together into a shape and loomed over her from where the headstone had stood. Vaguely human, with burning-hot green eyes. She looked up at it.

“You know nothing!”

The words didn't so much resonate in her ears as in her head. She was expecting that. The very few immaterial things she'd spoken with had “talked” like that. Memaw said that
some
things could make real sounds, but not many, and most of those had a way to become fully material, like the banshee. This one's words were laden with a terrible anger, as if it was trying to frighten her out of the grave. Each word hit her like a blast of ice.

“Then tell me I'm wrong about Brenda, and I'll leave you alone,” she replied calmly, although every hair on her body was standing straight up.

“Unto the seventh generation!”
it spat at her.
“Unto the seventh generation! That is the curse!”

The revenant was not listening. There probably wasn't much there
to
listen. What was left of the spirit had devoted so much of itself to revenge that revenge was all that was left. But she still had to try. “Prove to me that I'm wrong about Brenda and I'll leave you alone,” she repeated.

Instead of replying, it attacked.

It moved with unbelievable speed. One moment, she
was staring at the vaguely human shape; the next, she only had time to register that it was moving before everything went black. It flung itself on her, enveloping her, trying to suffocate her as it had so many of Brenda's relatives, after it had destroyed their lives, driven away everything they loved, and filled their sleeping moments with nightmares and made their waking moments a misery. It managed to cover her completely; and although it couldn't actually force its way down her throat past her shields, it
did
cut off her air, along with her senses.

But she'd been ready for that. And now that she knew the lightning was on her side, so to speak—

She fought down the immediate rush of
I can't breathe!
and concentrated. There was a spell, if she could keep from panicking long enough to remember it….

Then the words formed in her mind, and the signs and sigils, and she dropped the shovel and got the hilt of her sacred knife, her
atheme,
in her hand. She pulled it from the sheath at her side, thrust it toward the heavens, and shouted—as best she could, with fading breath and against the muffling of the thing that had wrapped itself around her—the words to call the lightning to her.

White.

It wasn't a flash of light as much as a moment of searing whiteness. A moment when everything stopped and she stood there, blinded, transfixed, like a bug on a pin of power, at the heart of the blaze of a light that was so much more than light.

And then—

Then she was standing in the rain with her right hand stretched up, knife pointing at the sky, her clothing steaming.

The miasma was nowhere to be seen, but that didn't mean it was gone. Just temporarily dispersed. She had maybe ten minutes before it was back.

Better dig faster.

So she did. She dug as fast as she could, uncovering the coffin, then prying up the lid. It should have rotted away by now, but it hadn't. It hadn't because the revenant needed the coffin and what was in it in order to survive and keep killing. And with every kill it made, it got stronger, so it could keep the coffin and its contents intact, and keep killing. It was a vicious cycle and one that needed to end now, or it would not end until the last person with Macreedy DNA in his or her body died. “Unto the seventh generation?” That was a joke. This thing wanted to live on in the only way it knew, and it wasn't going to abide by any term limit. Once it got done with Macreedy descendants, well, it might find some other targets. That was how these old curses went—if they didn't get weaker with age, and this one hadn't, the thing behind the curse had found the way to a mad immortality.

The miasma began to form again as Di levered up the coffin lid. She was not at all surprised to see the intact body of Taylor Marcham inside, the marks of the rope that had hung him still on his neck.

The rain stopped, cut off abruptly. The graveyard went deathly still.

The miasma poured into the grave in a flood of fury and hate.

Poured into the body.

Taylor Marcham sat up in his coffin, face contorting in a spasm of rage.

Di jumped on his chest, driving him back down.

The body struggled insanely for a moment, clawing at her boots, shredding her jeans with its fingernails. But she was a lot stronger than she looked, she had leverage, and although the century-old body was intact, it was fragile. It broke several fingers on her boots and tried unsuccessfully to buck her off while she beat at it with the shovel. Abruptly it went limp.

Di wasn't fooled. She drove the shovel down, decapitating the corpse. In the moment of relief that gave her, she fumbled along the side of the grave and groped in her bag for the jar of salt, the jar of blessed water, and the rope from the noose that had hung him—which, bizarrely enough, she had found in the little wreck of a county museum down the road. Shouting the words of banishment and blessing, she doused the body head to toe in salt, then holy water; she dropped the rope on the body's chest as the miasma surged out of the neck cavity and went for her again.

This time she didn't need the lightning.
“Fiat lux!”
she screamed, and another burst of white-hot light erupted
from her, fueled by whatever that power was that inhabited her.

The miasma, again in vaguely human shape, was flung from her, breaking up a bit as it was repelled. She took that opportunity to get out of the grave, snatching up the jars of lighter fluid from the bag and flinging them into the grave so that they broke and splattered all over the body.

Then she called fire.

“Fiat ignis!”
she screamed, pointing at that thing in the grave.

The body went up in a sheet of flame all out of proportion to the amount of lighter fluid she'd thrown in there.

There was the worst scream she had ever heard in her life, and a final bolt of lightning cracked out of the sky and slammed into the grave, flinging Di backward and onto her ass in the mud, blinding her again. Her nose filled with the smell of ozone and she blacked out for a moment.

When she came to, there was rain in her face, mud in her ears, the smell of burned bones and burned hair in her nose, and the graveyard was empty of menace, dark clouds, or anything else.

She had to somehow explain to the nurse at the emergency room why she had flash burns on her face.

Fortunately, she didn't have to explain to Memaw.