Witches (36 page)

She’d placed a few long-distance telephone calls from Jessie’s and had been distressed and genuinely baffled when most of the witches and warlocks she knew and who she asked for help had turned her down cold. Too dangerous, some of them had said in strained voices, as if they’d known something she didn’t. Too much black magic to go up against, some had confessed. Signs are bad. Very bad. The word had spread quickly and so, it seemed, had the spinelessness. None of them had fooled Rebecca one bit. They were afraid—but of what? Rachel—or what stood behind her? Which was what, exactly? The cult was gone, so it couldn’t be them. Rebecca didn’t like to dwell too long on that problem.

The woods were brooding, silent, as Jane’s Chevy van rattled down the narrow road. They drove by the ruined and blackened shell of Amanda and Jake’s cabin and the sight caused Rebecca’s eyes to harden. Damn superstitious townspeople. Small-minded and vindictive. Things never changed, did they?

Miles farther down the country road, Ernie pulled over onto the frozen shoulder. “Well,” he said, glancing over at her and pointing over her right shoulder, “Black Pond is about a mile through those trees there. Can’t get any closer in a car. Up that hill and down on the other side. Can’t miss it. A big pond. A massive willow tree guards the place. The mist covers the water like a veil. Even as cold and icy as it is. So watch your step,” he cautioned.

“Thanks for the ride, Ernie, and the concern. But I can take care of myself.” She leaned forward toward him. “This could take a while.”

“I’ll wait. You sure I can’t be of any help? Can’t come with you? I’m pretty handy in the woods.”

“I imagine you are, but no, Ernie, I wasn’t fooling before when I said that this could be dangerous. I have to do it myself.”

Ernie’s eyes were the color of the flat gray sky outside “You’ll holler if you need me, won’t you?”

“Sure will.” Rebecca opened the car door and slid out. The frigid air took her breath away. She lowered her chin, tugging her coat tighter around her shivering body, and crunched away from the black car and toward where Ernie had said she’d find the pond. The sky was filling with thick slate-colored clouds and her breath froze the second it left her mouth. Never got this cold in the city, she grumbled to herself. The trees must suck all the heat off.

Her feet, boots or no, were lumps of ice before she’d scaled the hill. It was getting colder every minute, yet the snow was holding off and she was relieved for that, anyway. She stopped a moment at the top and waved down at Ernie as he sat smoking a cigarette behind the wheel. He waved back and gave her a thumbs up for luck.

She could feel Tibby shivering in her coat pocket. So far, he’d had nothing else to say. Figured. He was all griped out.

Rebecca turned and stumbled down the other side of the hill toward the wall of bluish fog shimmering across the field before her. She could see the towering willow tree, and trudged on through the icy-slick weeds.

With her witch’s intuition, she knew immediately she’d arrived at Black Pond the moment she broke through the hedges and spied the frozen body of water. Under the thickening smoke-rimmed clouds, she stood surveying the pond critically, her head cocked to one side. Every nerve in her body tingling:
Beware. This place is evil.

Tibby was strangely quiet.

The smell of smoke permeated the place. The stench of burning flesh caught at her nostrils as she
moved across the ground. She found signs of where the charred bodies had once lain, circles of ash under the thin layer of new ice, and she shuddered. The bodies, or what had been left of them, were long gone. Cleared away earlier by the police, according to Ernie. Boy, she’d love to have been able to read that
police report, she chuckled to herself.

The ambience of the whole place was malignant. Even she was enough of a witch to sense that. It was an ugly place, too, she thought, as she looked down upon the gleaming sheet of dark ice surrounded by grieving, dead gnarled trees. She could tell by looking at it that the pond wasn’t solid ice. It was too early in the winter for that. If she stepped out on it, she’d crash through.

She trod to the edge of the water, closed her eyes, and whispered the words of a spell she’d learned for beholding the recent past. It took every bit of power she possessed. She peeled her gloves off her hands and tucked them into her empty pockets. Backing up, and stretching her arms out to touch the stark willow tree with her bare fingers, she made a link with the place and allowed the images to flow into her mind.

She saw the cult as misty phantoms milling around her. Nebulous shadows of what was past and gone. Figures cowled in ebony robes. Chanting. Torches held high. With strange auras. Bright red and yellow emanations. Rebecca tensed up, the shock of her next discovery nearly knocking her over.

They hadn’t all been human ...the ones Amanda had destroyed. Some had been demons
.
The High Priest most assuredly.

They’d had a terrified boy with them. The specters scuffled by with the speed of light, their time different than hers because they were traveling now in another dimension. A child’s pitiful scream. A knife’s flash. They were torturing the child.

Then a monstrous panther with bared fangs and human eyes burst into their midst and attacked the High Priest and her sister, breathtaking in her righteous anger, and her power as she’d pounced down upon them had extracted her gruesome retribution.

Human-shaped torches. God.
Cries of agony and rage.

After all was done, Amanda, now in human form gathering the boy’s small still body into her arms, and staggering away.

Now Rebecca understood why Amanda had done what she’d done. She understood
and applauded her for it.

In her dream trance the time fled by as Rebecca searched for the rest of the truth. She waited, shivering in the frigid air, her bare hands long since numb. Then it grew darker. The clouds dissipated as she went back in time to a night five days past, and the trees moaned around her like living beings lost and in misery. She waited.

Eventually Amanda’s ethereal form returned, running, out of breath in the twilight that represented night, to the edge of the water which was now a liquid pool, no longer ice-coated. All around there rang a clashing and clanging. People shouting in anger and blood lust. Horses neighing. Amanda was being pursued.

She was fleeing from the townspeople and from something else that Rebecca couldn’t see. The odor of burnt wood clung to the past Amanda as she scrambled by her. Amanda held her shoulder in pain, blood gushing between her fingers. Someone had shot her.

Rebecca, so close she could see the terror and exhaustion on her sister’s grimy face, ached to step out of her vision and run to her sister’s aid. Yet she knew she couldn’t. It was only a dream.

It was true, then. Amanda had lost her magic. She hadn’t been able to fight back.

Then Rebecca watched in awed silence as a woman with long black hair and beckoning arms rose from the water and after speaking with Amanda beguilingly—Rebecca couldn’t understand a word that was said, though—lured her back into the depths with her. Rachel’s ghost.
And something else.

The water closed over them. The night became an overcast day again. The woods hushed. All the ghosts were gone. Rebecca moaned out loud, her heart lurched in her chest.
My God.

Rebecca had seen as much as she had only because it had happened to Amanda. She usually wasn’t this receptive but love is a strong bond, a strong conductor. Shivering like a frail leaf in a storm, she let her hands fall from the tree and rubbed her eyes, dazed. Drained. Frightened. She tried, really tried, to call the wraith back so she could question her.

Where’s Amanda? What have you done with her?

She couldn’t make Rachel come back. She didn’t have enough power.

Either Rachel was resisting her, or she was no longer here. I wonder where she is
,
Rebecca fretted, as she slipped her gloves back onto her stiff hands.

Tibby was tugging frantically at her sleeve from the ledge of the pocket where he’d been clinging. His eyes as wide as saucers. He was chattering in terror. Rachel had scared the bejesus out of him. He wanted to go. Now. He was raving something about the Devil being there. Watching them.

She smiled down at him and was about to lift his furry shape into her hands when his little body froze, his eyes turning glassy. A shadow crossed the dim sun, turning his eyes as red as fire. Suddenly her familiar jumped from her grasp and landed on the ground with a soft plop. He ran toward the base of the willow tree and started to dig like a beaver.

“Tibby, what are you doing?” she burst out, crouching down beside him. It was plain to see that he was trying to dig something up. That he wanted her to dig, too.

Something was there. Something under the ice and dirt. Rebecca picked up a stick, shoved Tibby aside, and furiously began to dig at the base of the willow tree. Puffs of cloudy air escaped from her open mouth. The dirt was partially frozen but that didn’t stop her. She got a bigger stick. Used her magic to turn it into a small shovel. Even she could handle that.

She dug and dug, Tibby observing until she held the small leather-wrapped parcel triumphantly in her hands, which were so unfeeling from the cold that she could barely unwrap what she’d found.

A book of some kind.

Whose?

It was old. Very old. No telling how long it’d been there. A marvel that it was still intact. She leafed through the pages. She couldn’t read a word of it. It seemed to be in an ancient language.

What did the book have to do with Amanda?

As Rebecca stood up with the book cradled in her hands, the uncalled vision came like a train out of the fog and answered her question.

She saw a dim, filthy cell. A prison. With people wailing out in fear and pain...in shackles and chains...the scent of fresh blood curdled her stomach...and somewhere in the shadows Amanda cried. Alone. Forsaken. She’d lost her powers, was helpless. Rebecca was sure it was Amanda. Yet in the flickering candlelight she didn’t look like Amanda...she had waist-length black hair and piercing blue eyes. She and the people around her were dressed in peculiar clothes. Another time….

Then as swiftly as it’d come, the image dissolved.

Abigail’s psychic dream had been accurate. Amanda
was
trapped in the past. In another woman’s body and another woman’s life. A woman who resembled the ghost that’d taken Amanda into the water. Rachel. Why was Amanda in Rachel’s body? Startled, Rebecca believed she knew the answer.
To take Rachel’s place...
and legend said that Rachel was probably killed for being a witch.

That’s why Rachel had wanted her. To trade places with her. To die for her? No wonder Rachel’s ghost was no longer haunting Black Pond. It was most likely waiting in the world in between. Waiting for Amanda to die. Then Rachel could possess her twentieth-first century body. Wound and all.

Good God.
Rebecca whistled out loud. At least Amanda’s wound, the one she had when she’d went into the pond, hadn’t killed her.

Rebecca collapsed on the ground by the tree’s trunk and regarded the book in her hands. It was the key. She knew it. The book had something to do with where Amanda was now, and had something to do with releasing her. If Rebecca could figure it out. Amanda must have touched the book or held it at some time for such images to have come from it. Sometime long ago. Somewhere in the past Amanda was still alive and something very powerful was keeping her there. Not just Rachel.

You’re in way over your damn head, Rebecca, she told herself, mulling over Amanda’s predicament.

Who the hell do you think you’re fooling, my dear, really? You’re no damn Amanda. You’re just a fortune-telling, book-writing, sniffling nobody of a witch. Telling fortunes and reading tarot cards are more your speed. You’re no match for evil such as this. No match at all. How are you going to get Amanda back? You stupid witch.

Just the thought of Amanda in danger and alone drove her on relentlessly. Her lips had settled into a thin, grim line of pure defiance.

I’ll find a way. I swear it. I’ll get you back, Amanda.

Could be a hell of a book, too, if it was all true. Another bestseller. Rebecca’s eyes glistened.

Picking Tibby up from the ground, using the tree trunk she pulled herself to her feet, and set him on her shoulder where he snuggled up against her neck. Amazingly, he seemed to be asleep. As if his experiences had knocked him out. How did he know there’d been a book at the base of the willow? Hmmm. When he awoke from his stupor, she’d have to ask him.

As she dragged her feet back through the darkening woods toward the Chevy, Rebecca thought about the book in her pocket and wondered how she was going to decipher it. She also remembered the evil presence that had hunkered behind Rachel’s ghost as she’d drawn Amanda into the water in her vision. Rebecca, even now, wasn’t sure she’d really seen what she thought she’d seen. A huge shadowy beast of some kind behind Amanda’s abductor...impossible. Right? Even a mid-level demon wouldn’t have cast such a forbidding aura. She didn’t even want to think about what sort of demon would have. Third level up, at least. Higher? Uh, oh.

Every nerve in her short, plump body was aquiver as she recalled the fiery-red nebula.
Only Satan would create such a signature.