Witches (44 page)

They had to get away from Canaan. They had to hurry. Even Amanda sensed that. Joshua slapped the edge of the reins against his horse’s flanks and prodded him into a full gallop. They were far enough away from town now to do so. She held on tightly and they rode hard.

It was then the exhaustion drowned her, taking the strength from her muscles. She could talk no more. Think no more. Her eyes closed. She was with the man she loved and he’d take care of her now. Protect her. She trusted him. Safe, in her lover’s arms, and Amadeus in hers, she could finally relax.

They’d been riding for hours, the descending moon shining down on the man with the sleeping woman cradled in his arms, when Joshua heard the pounding of hooves coming up behind them quickly. Too quickly. A shout rang out on the still night air. Another and another.

Amanda came to with a start, her mind clouded with an acute foreboding of a coming disaster. She’d been dreaming. In the dream, her sister, Rebecca, was looking for her. Calling her.

I’ve found you. Come home. To Witch’s Pond. Now.

“What’s wrong, Joshua?” she cried out, as the horse leaned in low and fast against the wind. Its gallop now a dead out run for their lives, as tired as the beast probably already was. Amadeus clung to his mistress with all four paws, claws out, like a burr. Amanda gripped on to the pommel to keep from falling off.

“Sebastien and his men are pursuing us,” he said breathlessly. “I have known it for a long time. Now they have found us. Our only chance is to outrun them. Or hide from and lose them.”

Amanda said nothing further as
they raced through the night. She’d believed she’d heard her sister calling only in the dream. Wishful thinking, no more. She was wrong. As they fled, she heard Rebecca’s voice in her head again.

Amanda, come to Black Pond. Come now. Come home or you’ll die. And all those with you.

You must return.

Amanda made her decision. She believed the warning.

“Joshua,” she yelled at him against the wind. “Go back. Back toward Canaan and my cottage. To Black Pond. We’ll be safe there.”

Joshua yanked the horse to a standstill, looked into her eyes in the moonlight.

“Art thou sure?” Doubt in what she was asking him, not in her.

“Yes, I’m sure. We must go back to Black Pond. It’ll save us. Trust me.”

“I do,” he swore. He thought for a few precious moments, then nodded. “And we will go. It might throw them off our trail, doubling back like that. They will not be expecting it.” He reined the lathered horse around and started back, slanting their path so they wouldn’t head directly into Sebastien’s way, but circle around him if they could.

Amanda prayed she’d made the right decision. She was going to take Joshua back with her. To her time. To hell with destiny, and what was right or wrong. To hell with not interfering with mankind or time. She loved him and he loved her, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t live without him. She would do it, or die with him at Witch’s Pond. She’d not lose the love of her life twice. She would not.

They evaded their pursuers in the thick trees when they passed them. They were lucky in that.

That’s all they were lucky in. A short time later, the furious yells of discovery arose. Sebastien and his acolytes were riding hard behind them, closing in.

Joshua’s horse was stumbling on his feet as they drew near Black Pond. Musket shots rang out through the night and suddenly Gabriel was crashing, falling beneath them.

The horse sprawled on the ground, dying, as Joshua and Amanda rolled free and came to their feet in shock. They’d run him to death. Joshua crouched over his horse as its last breath stilled, comforting the beast. He grabbed his musket, her arm, and continued to propel them through the woods on foot, because their enemies were so near.

In the end, Amanda didn’t know what had happened to Amadeus. He might have been caught under the horse. Crushed or pinned. She hadn’t seen him after Gabriel went down. Not anywhere, though she’d whispered out his name frantically as Gabriel lay dying. Amanda had to leave, not knowing if her familiar was alive or not.

Amanda and Joshua picked their way through the brambles and thorns toward the pond. Amanda’s eyes wet with tears over Amadeus and Gabriel. Her heart reeling because she feared what might be waiting before them as well as what was behind them.

There was magic in the air, she could feel it. It was getting stronger. Beckoning her on. It hadn’t been so long ago that she’d been a practicing witch. She remembered. She felt as if she were in the end of a dream, a nightmare. Her thoughts were sluggish, feverish, her movements painstakingly slow. The world spun around her. Nothing seemed real.

What did it mean?

Chapter Seventeen

The demons attacked a third time before dawn. Rebecca was ready for them, but Ernie wasn’t.

They were in snake form this time, bathed in that same eerie luminosity as the previous demons; they slithered over the snowy ground and tried to cover the car like a slimy blanket. Serpents of various sizes and varieties. All of them as mean and nasty as blazes. With teeth and fangs, and some with acidy venom they could spray out for yards.

Tibby clung to the ledge of Rebecca’s window and made faces at the demons from inside, sure he was safe. He hadn’t said another word all night, even though Ernie had kept an ear on him, wanting so badly to hear more words from his mouse mouth so he would stop thinking he was crazy.

Rebecca thought Ernie was going to have a stroke.

“I hate reptiles.” He shuddered. His face was wedged against the windshield as he surveyed the monstrosities gliding and crawling toward them. He’d turned the lantern light up as bright as it would go and snapped on the headlights. A particularly persistent group of the vipers were throwing their slippery bodies against the car. Hissing and biting at the vehicle because they couldn’t get to the occupants.

“I loathe snakes. They act as if they know it, too,” Ernie remarked sharply.

“I’m sure that’s why they’re here,” Rebecca said. A tingling had begun in her shoulders and was now traveling to her fingertips. Power build-up. She could feel the magic in the air around them. A stronger magic than she’d ever been aware of before. It’d been protecting them the whole night.

* * * *

“God, I thought that last batch—the ones that looked like huge locusts but with the human faces—was bad,” Ernie stated. “Ugh, but these are even uglier.”

The snow had stopped, but it was so deep now that Ernie couldn’t open the door. Rebecca would have to use her powers to get them out the next time. To get them back to Canaan. Outside, a rosy glow tinted the horizon. Ernie’s eyes locked on to it as if it were his salvation.

Rebecca had mentioned that most demons disliked sunlight immensely. He hoped she was right. He was looking forward to at least eight straight hours of no lurching, stalking, or flying nightmares. His nerves were shot. He was a strong man but he’d never seen the likes of what he’d seen in the last night, and he prayed never to see their likes again. If he hadn’t cared for Amanda as much as he did, he would have left long ago. If it hadn’t been for Rebecca’s strong magic, the three of them, he was pretty sure, would already be dead.

“Can you get rid of them, too?” Ernie asked, now openly distressed. He could hear Rebecca’s strained breathing next to him and Tibby scuttling about. Yet he was afraid to take his eyes off the things attacking the car. If one of them got in...

Rebecca had dealt with the last plague of demons with some kind of sooty gray fog she’d conjured up with her newfound powers. The killing cloud had come out of the nebulous doorway like a freight train and had choked the locust-critters into oblivion. They’d rolled over on their spiked backs and stuck their grisly little legs up into the air, dematerializing as the smoke ate them. Gruesome.

“I can try.”

The demons were converging around, on, and under the van by that time and they were plunged into blackness as dark as a sealed tomb. Couldn’t see a damn thing. The lantern had gone out and Ernie couldn’t seem to relight it for anything.

Something was thumping under their feet.

“Then do it now,” Ernie mumbled in a voice not much different from Tibby’s, when he was scared witless.

* * * *

Rebecca reached out for the magic she’d need, and as with the other times, it mysteriously came to her and did her bidding.

The magic. She didn’t know exactly where it came from, or why it didn’t weaken her like magic usually did. How she even knew what to say. It was just there for her. After the second time, she was smart enough to accept the truth: it wasn’t coming from her. At least, not all of it.

“Do you feel that?” Rebecca announced in the gloom, as Tibby directed something private into her ear. She nodded a reply.

Vibrations were rocking the car, harder and harder. Quake size. Again, Rebecca sensed that Ernie and she were in a protective bubble. The world outside the car was raucously shaking itself into a great fury—but they were untouched.

Light began to seep in. Ernie gazed over at her in relief. The car was shedding off the snake-demons, and as they fell, they were breaking into thousands of pieces as if they were fragile glass. The vibrations were shattering them.

The carnage scattered about them on the cold white stuff and began
to smoke and dissolve. Soon there was nothing left
of the last attack force but sullied snow.

“Rebecca, you amaze me.” Ernie’s face turned to the rising sun as if he’d never thought to see it again. “How did you do that?”

“I’m pretty sure I had help,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not so naive to think I did that all myself.”

Looking out at the pond in the faint sunlight, she was the first to see the doorway. Now it was as large as a boxcar. Inside it was summer. The trees that rustled in the breezes were lush and green. Grass on the ground. Birds flying by in a summer evening sky. As she watched the light in that other world fade to twilight, she was fascinated. In her world dawn was coming, in that world it was almost night. Warm there, freezing and winter-bound here. It was the most remarkable thing she’d ever witnessed. Heaven knew how much time had gone by there for Amanda.

In Tibby’s eyes Rebecca could see the lights from the doorway reflected like miniature fireworks. Magnificent.

The witch didn’t say anything to Ernie, but struggled into her coat, hat, and mittens, and pushed at the door until she somehow got it open. The overabundance of snow didn’t stop her.

Tibby jumped into her pocket at the last possible second like a stunt daredevil as she plunged out into the winter morning. Eyes riveted to the staggering light show before her, Rebecca slogged her way to the edge of the pond. Drawn to the growing window of light like a person in a darkened house drawn to a lighted room.

Amanda was close. She knew it.

What would happen to her, the witch pondered, if she walked into that other dimension and went searching for her sister? Physically brought her back?

Too dangerous yet.
A voice hummed in her mind.
Wait.

Rebecca, tears running down her cold cheeks, stood at the rim of the huge hole into another time and called out her sister’s name over and over. “Amanda, come to me. Amanda! I’m here.”

For some reason, she accepted there wasn’t much time left. Something terrible was about to happen in that other world. Something that involved her lost sister.

The witch studied the strange phenomenon for a long time even though her face, hands, and feet were soon blocks of ice. When she swung around and tromped back to Ernie and the van, the mailman was outside inspecting the damage. Shaking his head and rubbing his red eyes.

“Those demons were nothing, Rebecca,” he muttered with a grunt, “compared to what Jane’s gonna do to me when she sees her car.” He kicked out at the snow with a large booted foot like a little kid. “She’s gonna kill me. She just made the last payment on it.”

“It is a mess, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” Ernie said, a frown settling on his face, his hands stuffed deep into his coat pockets. There was frost glistening on his beard. The usual sock cap pulled low over his head, his long hair streaming out from under it. There was a hole in the elbow of his blue jacket. He truly looked pathetic.

Rebecca laughed, and raised her hand over the car. There was a spiraling of snow, a screech of metal realigning and rearranging itself. Then cold silence.

The car was complete again. Unmauled and unscratched. The same exact car they’d driven out there in.

“I appreciate that, Rebecca.” Ernie grinned at her. “You’re really getting good at this.”

“You’re welcome,” Rebecca answered cheerfully, her face lined with fatigue in the rising sun’s radiance.

“Thank you for appreciating it.”
Even though it isn’t me doing it. Thanks, anyway. It
feels good to be a winner, if only for a short time. It really feels good.

Ernie lumbered through the snow and to the bank of the pond. He looked at the glimmering doorway and whistled.

“Never would have believed it. It’s fantastic. To the day I die, Rebecca, I will never forget this. Any of it. The night we’ve just passed through, the demon attacks, that mouse talking.
Talking
.” He shook his head. “It’s been an...experience.”