Witches (20 page)

Somewhere off in the gloom beyond the pond, earthly nocturnal creatures mourned as if they sensed the coming battle between good and evil. Frightened, as always, that the evil would win. The willow tree’s branches sang a song of loneliness as they brushed against the night winds.

Amanda changed back into her human form and confronted them. Mustn’t let them see her fear. That would be her downfall. Her hair flew about her stony face; only her flashing eyes showing the fury she was fighting to control. She’d fought demons before, but never this many at once. Never so many, so evil. She remembered some of the visions she’d had of their earlier brutal kills and her body shook violently.

“Let him go, now,” Amanda ordered, raising her finger to point at the demon. “Or I’ll destroy you. All of you.” Her gaze traveled coldly around the circle.

“Not likely. You are only one witch, after all, and we are many.” The high priest smirked at her, his forked tongue flicking across his lips. He nodded his head at the others. They began to close in on her.

“But I have God on my side,” she told them calmly. “And you have only Satan.”

The demon with the knife slashed upward on the child’s thin arm and the long wicked gash spurted blood across the monster’s face. Jonny screamed and fainted. The demon’s long tongue darted out again and lapped up the warm blood greedily, a look of pleasure on its beastly face.

In that split second of white hot rage, Amanda forgot all the rules, forgot everything she’d ever learned or believed in. How many other innocent victims had they tortured and murdered? How many children slaughtered? How many more?

No more.

She pointed her hand at the leader and a jagged line of crackling fire exploded from her fingertips like a lightning bolt and hit him in the chest. A surprised, then shocked look rippled across his countenance right before he burst into flames, screeching like a banshee.

The rest of the coven turned and attacked her.

From out of the blue Amadeus was at her side then, all teeth and claws. All over them. He was no match for the demons, but he did a good job keeping the human followers busy while she attended to the others.

The fire bolt struck again and again and the yells of the dying filled the night…and the horrible stench of burning human and demon flesh.

She heard Amadeus’s bloodcurdling screech as one of the coven smacked him against a tree and his body fell into the undergrowth. She was too busy keeping the demons away from Jonny to go to his aid.

She destroyed every last one. Murdered them all. Until there were none left. Just piles of smoldering burnt flesh that once were either demon or human. Those called up by Rachel evaporated into smoke and scuttled back to where they had come from. Hell probably.

When it was over, she stumbled across to see if Jonny was still alive. He was. Barely, but blood was flowing everywhere. If she didn’t help him quickly, he’d die.

She checked on Amadeus. He was battered and beaten, but already moving around when she found him in the brambles. She picked him up and took him to where the boy was.

She laid down the cat and gathered Jonny’s frail body into her arms.

With grieving eyes she took in the carnage around her, what she’d done...and was horrified at it. She’d killed
.
Not the demons, they didn’t count, but the human members of the coven. Six had definitely been human.

The guilt swept over her like a beating. She bent down and threw up in the grass. She was sick. Slumping to the wet ground beside the stone altar with Jonny in her arms, she wept. Great racking sobs.

She’d done the worst thing a white witch could do. She’d murdered. She knew that somehow, someway, she’d end up paying for it.

The rain poured from the skies, soaking her, the unconscious child, and a shell-shocked Amadeus even as they huddled beneath the canopy of the willow.

The eerie illumination had died with the coven. It was pitch black.

“You did a fine job helping me, Amadeus. Thank you,” she breathed.

A triumphant meow came from her right somewhere and a furry head came up under the palm of her hand. She was cold all of a sudden. And so weary, she could almost lay her head down in the wet weeds and sleep. So dizzy. No. Must stay awake, she told herself.

“Can you make it, Amadeus?” she asked in a weak voice.

No answer except his wobbly rubbing against her. He meowed throatily and she knew he’d make it one way or another.

“Then let’s go.”

She didn’t have time for self-pity. Glaring over her shoulder, she could see the ball of light that was Rachel’s ghost still floating over the middle of the lake, coming nearer.

If the coven had completed its sacrifice, what would have happened then? She looked down at Jonny, not wanting to dwell on it, ignoring the specter suspended between worlds. She wasn’t sure, but in the newborn silence she could have sworn she heard laughter from somewhere in the mists. Her preoccupied mind trudged on to other more urgent matters.

She must tend to the child. Get him out of the wet and cold. She had nothing to wrap the boy in, so she lifted his body gently up from the stone and hugged him close to her shivering frame. He was so small, so weightless. Her hands filled with a warm sticky substance. Jonny was bleeding heavily.

She laid a hand on him and whispered the right words to heal. Nothing. Again. With a gut wrenching feeling, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to witch him well. She couldn’t help him in any way. Now.

Because she’d used herself up fighting the coven and the demons, or because she’d broken the Great Law and taken life? She wasn’t sure. One would be temporary, the other...

No matter, she warned herself angrily. She had to get the child somewhere warm and dry. Safe. Somewhere where they could stop the bleeding, suture the wounds. A hospital.

Shaken, she tried to witch them all to the clinic in Canaan. Again, nothing happened.

She sent out a thought.

Amadeus, can you hear me?

No answer. Not even a meow, though she could dimly see his fuzzy form curled at her feet.

Her powers were gone. All of them.

For every asking, there was a payment. For every sin, there was punishment, her mind nudged her vindictively.

She hunched in the rain and the dark under the rustling tree with the boy in her arms. Rachel’s ghost was behind her, half-formed and drifting nearer to the shore.

She had to get away. Had to hurry.

She couldn’t wait for her powers to return—if they ever would—so she painfully stood up with the boy in her arms and began the trek back to town to get Jonny help. Carrying the child, Amadeus limping behind like a wounded soldier, coupled with her exhaustion and the inclement night, she calculated, the journey could take hours.

Another punishment she deserved, she decided numbly, not the boy.

She prayed that he’d live through it, and began walking, Amadeus trailing drunkenly behind her, his tail dragging.

Chapter Six

After a couple of miles plodding through the soot-dark woods, Amanda’s legs began to quiver and her muscles to cramp, but she only pushed herself harder, staggering along with the boy in her arms while the shadowy limbs scratched and tore at her face and clothing. Without her magic, she was vulnerable to fatigue, cold, and hunger. She couldn’t just witch it away. The rain had plastered her clothes to her body and her teeth chattered. She wore what she’d had on when she’d bolted out the door after Amadeus: jeans, shirt, and tennis shoes. No coat, gloves, or hat. She wished fervently that she had grabbed her coat on the way out. There was no changing that now, though.

The boy, who in the beginning felt light as a feather, soon felt like an iron anvil clasped in her arms; they became numb, like her mind, yet she ignored the miseries of her body and her heart and dragged herself on. She couldn’t let Jonny die. She just couldn’t.

Amadeus fell farther and farther behind. She tried stopping every so often to let him catch up, but he was holding her back and Jonny’s heartbeat was dwindling. His warmth seeping away into the frigid night. He’d never come to. She had to keep going. What she wouldn’t have done at that moment to have had a dry, thick blanket to wrap the boy in.

Amadeus would make it back to the cabin somehow; he hadn’t been that badly hurt.

It wasn’t long after that when Jonny began to thrash in her embrace, moaning and choking. Taken off balance, she toppled to the wet ground and sat there rocking and soothing the child until he quieted.

Then low in his throat she heard the dreaded death rattle.

“No, oh, no, Jonny,” she cried, drawing his chilled body tighter to her breast, tears welling up in her eyes. “You can’t give up now. You can’t die now.”

The ominous gurgling grew louder. Jonny was dying.

She tried her magic one last time. Nothing.

“Oh, God, please don’t let him die.”

Then Amanda remembered the Guardian’s familiar who’d appeared to warn her in Boston, and the last words he’d uttered.

“Gibbiewackett. Gibbiewackett!” she shouted into the rainy night, her voice almost lost in the wind. She screamed his name over and over, her face raised to the sky, her body straining to send the message as far as she could. “I’m calling you...not for me...but for Jonny.
Please, if you hear me and you or your master can help him...help him!
I beg
of you. Don’t let an innocent child die. I’m the one who did wrong, not him,” she wailed despairingly, her voice finally turning into sobs. She bent her cracked lips to the boy’s face and cried against his clammy skin.

The rattle stopped. Jonny grew still.

As Amanda peered into the boy’s face in the dark, she thought he opened his eyes and smiled at her.

“What are we doing out in the woods in the rain, Miss Givens?” The timbre weak, but steady. His frail arms rose up and wrapped around her neck trustingly. “I’m cold,” he said in a tiny voice. “Hungry.” He nuzzled against her neck and became motionless again.

This time she could hear his soft sleepy breathing and his body seemed warmer. At ease. He was not going to die, after all.

Amanda thanked God, Gibbiewackett and his master. She had no doubt that someone had saved Jonny. In fact, she was sure of it. It hadn’t been her.

She continued her journey through the woods, her joy at Jonny’s miraculous recovery giving her new spirit, if not the energy she needed. She fought to keep awake and moving one foot in front of another. Jonny mentioning he was hungry had reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since the night before, either. The hunger pains gnawed at her insides.

Once or twice she stopped. Afraid she was lost. It was so dark. Had she come this way yet or not? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t seen Amadeus for a long time. She prayed he was home and not lying in the bushes somewhere, wounded and hurting.

Leaning against a tree because she could no longer go on without rest, she first smelled the smoke. The rain and the wind had abated, and the pungent odor of burning wood hung on the night air like a foggy curtain.

With Jonny in her arms, she followed the scent of the smoke until she saw the flames licking the sky above the trees ahead. A huge bonfire.

Here? In the dead of a freezing night in the middle of the woods?

People. People to help her and Jonny.

The shouts and howls of an angry mob struck Amanda’s hopes down.

She was drawn to the maelstrom of noise and destruction but when she got to what was burning, she was so stunned at what she saw she fell back against a tree, her mouth open and her eyes shocked; unaware she’d been spotted.

The townspeople were burning her cabin! The cabin Jake had built for her so many years ago. Her home.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ...just like the cult.

More punishment. A loss of power, a house, for those lives she’d taken. What next? She deserved worse and yet her heart broke as she watched the fire devour everything she owned; the last part of Jake that she had. All her furniture, clothes. Her memories. They were even torching her work shed with the pottery wheel, pots, and medicinal herbs. Herbs she’d spent years collecting.

“No!” She heard herself shouting at them. “No. No. No.” The last fell to a whimper as the men with hateful faces came toward her.

She gently laid the boy’s body on the ground, and stood up unsteadily, preparing to explain to them what had happened. Explain that Jonny was okay and that she’d saved him from the cult. That they needed to take him to a hospital right away.

Before she could open her mouth, the crowd of perhaps eleven or twelve men surged toward her with blood in their eyes, and clubs in their fists. Shouting awful things at her. Throwing rocks and sticks.

“There she is!” one of them yelled excitedly. “And look...look! She has Jonny! She did take him, I told you so. She’s murdered him. Get her!”

“Wait, wait!” She tried to interject, putting her hands up to protect her face from the thrown rocks, but the cresting wave of screaming vengeance as the mob charged drowned her words.

Frozen for a second with the feeling that she was in some awful nightmare and this wasn’t happening to her, Amanda stumbled backward, tripped on a branch, and sprawled in the weeds.