24

DON’T SCRY FOR ME

Dru’s heart was pounding hard as they scrambled back into Hell-bringer and roared away into the night in a blast of exhaust and howling rubber. Outside the demon car’s windows, the ghostly fronts of dark warehouses streaked past in the darkness. Their rows of tall loading doors were blacked out in deep shadows, like a chorus of mouths open in silent screams. Dru scrutinized every passing building, dreading another ambush. The wraiths had caught them off guard once already, and that had been nearly fatal. She watched the night carefully.

The only sound inside the car was the constant growl of Hellbringer’s big engine. “Best bet is if we head out of town,” Greyson said into the tense silence. “Get us somewhere where we have more room to maneuver. Those things can move through walls. But we can’t. We need to make sure we don’t get boxed in.”

Dru nodded, resisting the urge to add the word ‘again’ to that thought. She kept looking back into the darkness behind them, expecting the horde of ravenous wraiths to come sailing up behind them, eyes burning like hot embers, hungry for their souls.

Rane caught her eye and silently raised her empty hands. The frustrated expression on her face was clear. I can’t do anything.

Any other sorcerer Dru had ever met would have been absolutely crushed by such a defeat. But Rane looked simply angry and determined, as if this was just one more obstacle in her path to be overcome. Dru took some small comfort in the fact that her friend was just as tough mentally as she was physically.

Dru smiled as reassuringly as she could. I know. She would find a way to heal Rane. She had to. With Rane left powerless like this, they were doomed.

Sitting beside Rane in the back seat, Salem licked his thumb and paged through the ancient book on Decimus, obviously looking for a specific passage. When he found it, he handed the surprisingly heavy book to Dru. “Read this part. Don’t worry, it’s in English, so you won’t have to strain yourself.”

Dru ignored the barb and took the book from him. By the light of her cell phone, she studied its aged pages. The uneven sheets of parchment appeared to have been cut apart and sewn into a book long after it was written. The musty leather binding was so dry and cracked that she feared it would fall apart in her hands. She suspected this wasn’t even the first binding that had wrapped around these pages. Everything was carefully hand-lettered in ink that the centuries had faded to the color of old wood. In some places, the parchment was so thin that the handwriting showed through on the other side of the page.

It was written in English, all right, but it was Old English, which still required quite a bit of mental translation on Dru’s part. The grammar was closer to German than to modern English. The book described Decimus and his ruthless hunt to claim the apocalypse scroll—and with it, solidify his powerful grip over the entire world. Definitely not a nice guy. Then again, he wasn’t known as Decimus the Delightful.

The anonymous author of the book claimed that he or she had personally observed Decimus, referred to here as Decimus the Damned, descend through a cave into the netherworld. The author even claimed that within the netherworld, Decimus had found a gate that led down to Tartarus, a lake of fire so deep in the abyss that hardly any mortal beings had ever set foot there.

To bolster this far-fetched account, the author of the Katabasis cited other works of antiquity that Dru had mostly never even heard of. The quotations were set apart from the main text by double diples (>>), which were early precursors of modern quotation marks.

Dru pointed them out to Salem. “I think this book is a fake.”

Salem couldn’t have looked more shocked if she had ripped off his top hat and beaten him with it. Which she had actually considered doing, from time to time.

Awkwardly, she held up the book so that he could see it over the seat. “See here? That’s a double diple, which was invented by Rufinus of Aquileia in the fifth century. The thing is, Decimus died in the destruction of Pompeii, in the first century, before anything like quotation marks were invented. Since this book was written at least four hundred years after he died, it can’t possibly be a firsthand account like it claims to be.”

In the driver’s seat, Greyson checked the mirrors. “Can a sorcerer live that long?”

From the back seat, Rane said, “Who wants to?”

“No. Not that I’ve ever heard of.” Dru gave Salem a searching look. “How old are you, anyway? Exactly?”

“Please. I think you’re getting your wires crossed. There’s a simpler explanation for this book. Our anonymous fifth-century sorcerer used a particularly potent scrying spell to look back in time and find out exactly what Mr. Accursed was up to. And then they just wrote it all down.”

“ That’s your simpler explanation? At best, this could be a copy of an earlier work. Heavily annotated and embellished.”

Salem’s half-crazed eyes grew even larger, revealing the entirety of their bloodshot whites. “Just. Keep. Reading.”

Dru held his crazed gaze, wondering what sort of secret communication was passing between them, because Salem obviously thought he was sending her a message, even though he wasn’t.

Puzzled, Dru faced front again and flipped through the pages, skimming over the Old English as quickly as she could. The bizarre grammar was starting to give her a headache, as sentences that started out meaning one thing ended up meaning the complete opposite.

If the book had really been a blow-by-blow account of how Decimus entered the netherworld and found the apocalypse scroll, then it would have been incredibly valuable to Dru. Because then she would have a chance to reverse-engineer everything Decimus had done. And the world would be safe again.

But nothing was that easy. The book noticeably lacked the crucial knowledge she needed. It didn’t explain how Decimus had found the scroll, or where. The book just dwelled at length on how terrible it would be if any of the seven seals were broken. As if she didn’t already know that.

As Hellbringer left the golden-lighted towers of the Denver skyline behind and shot out of town into the stillness of the dry plains, Dru grew more and more frustrated with the book. She was about to toss it aside in frustration, until she flipped to the very end and saw what was on the last few pages. Her jaw dropped open.

The pages were filled with cryptic magical signs. She immediately recognized it as sorcio, the language of sorcery. The very first symbol was an elongated hexagon, meaning crystalos.

It was a crystal magic spell.

Her pulse quickened as she flipped the pages back and forth, mentally switching between Old English and the esoteric language of sorcery. She puzzled out that it was a scrying spell, which enabled the caster to see events that had occurred centuries before. Apparently, the author had been telling the truth about witnessing Decimus descend into the netherworld.

There was a chance maybe Dru could do the same, if she could find the right crystal.

That was a challenge, though, because the spell called for a crystal that was largely unknown at the time. The author described it as a cursed yellow crystal that bloomed in sandstone like a field of dusty yellow flowers. Handling it too much was said to bring disease and death. So it was definitely toxic, possibly even radioactive.

Dru scratched her head, mentally sorting through dozens of possible crystals, until she remembered the carnotite crystal she had once special-ordered for Salem. Carnotite was a strange yellow crystal formed by trickles of water that millions of years ago had seeped through petrified trees and fossils, dissolving uranium from the surrounding sandstone. It matched the description. Had Salem somehow figured out, from this secret book, how to cast a scrying spell to peer into the distant past? How had he done it? And more importantly, what did he see?

She looked back over her shoulder to where he sat in the gloom of the back seat. From the glum look on his face, she suddenly knew, without a doubt, that he had tried to cast the spell himself—and failed miserably. It wasn’t any surprise, considering that he wasn’t a crystal sorcerer.

But she was. And the moment she had helped him with his corrupted arm, she had seen the shock on his face. As if he had never before considered just how powerful her crystal magic could be. He’d seen her cast magic plenty of times before. But that was the first time she had cast a spell that directly benefited him.

For once, she had truly impressed him. And that was why he had shown her this book, so that he could convince her to cast this scrying spell for him. That explained why he hadn’t come right out and asked. She could only imagine how much of a blow it was to Salem’s fragile ego to face the fact that she was, in this particular case at least, a more powerful sorcerer than he was.

A tiny, deep-down wicked part of her wanted to voice that fact. After suffering so much condescension and aggravation from him over the years, she wanted to hold this over him, even just for a moment.

But just one look at his defeated expression told her that he had come to the same conclusion. He knew what she was thinking. He was at her mercy.

If their situations were reversed, she had no doubt that he would put her in her place. But she decided to take the higher ground instead.

“So…there seems to be a crystal spell in the back of this book,” she said with as much innocence as she could muster.

Rane and Greyson traded looks.

“Oh, is there?” Salem said carefully, sitting up straight. “And what do you think about this particular spell that you’ve discovered?”

Dru savored this tiny victory for just a moment longer, but she had to get back to business. She sighed. “Pretty sure I could cast it, if I had the right crystal. But I don’t.”

The relief that flooded his features would have been embarrassing to watch, if it weren’t so amusing. “I thought you would never ask.” He reached into the inside pocket of his voluminous black coat and pulled out a scratched gray metal box the size of a hip flask. She recognized it from his hiding space behind the poster. Carefully, he undid the tiny brass latches along the side and opened the box.

“Oh. Well, lookee here.” In Salem’s hands, radiant against the dull lead box, was the yellow carnotite crystal. His eyes glittered. “Where do you want to cast the spell?”

* * *

To do her magic, Dru needed a quiet, safe location. Her shop was usually the best place, when it wasn’t blown to pieces. This far outside the city, in the middle of nowhere, nothing looked promising.

Greyson turned Hellbringer off the two-lane state highway onto a rough rural road that led through a thick aspen grove. Past that, dry hay fields spread out on either side, silver and ghostly in the moonlight. In the distance, the only sign of habitation was the dark hulk of an old barn that leaned dangerously to one side. Some bit of metal or broken glass flashed against Hellbringer’s headlights.

Rane leaned up against the back of Greyson’s seat, alert and watchful. “Get us closer, dude. Me and Salem will go check it out, make sure nothing’s hinky in there.”

“I have my spyglass,” Salem said. “I can see it from here.”

“Screw that.” She pounded on the back of Greyson’s seat. “Let me out.”

While Salem argued with her, Greyson looked a question at Dru.

“I just have to be out of the car and not moving. So, this is fine,” she said, although she wasn’t really sure about it at all. Trying to cast a millennia-old crystal spell for the first time, out of the back of a moldy fifth-century manuscript, using a radioactive crystal, on the side of the road. What could possibly go wrong?

She took a deep breath and blew it out. “How far away are the wraiths?”

He pulled over, set the parking brake, and shut off the engine. “Tough to say. They’re still following us. I can sense them back there.” He winced, as if a sudden muscle cramp had just seized up the back of his neck. “Just don’t go too far from the car.”

Dru got out on stiff legs and tilted the seat forward so that Salem could climb out of the back. Rane, smiling crookedly, practically dragged him toward the abandoned barn, despite his protests. Then she whispered in his ear, and from that point on they moved in uncanny silence, slipping away into the night, perfectly in sync. Dru wondered how many times the two of them had worked together to fight different kinds of supernatural evil.

“They make a good team,” Greyson said, coming over to her side of the car. “Too bad they’re always trying to kill each other.”

“I hope they make it,” Dru said.

“To the barn?”

“Just in general.” Dru looked around at the unimpressive hay field, realizing with a grimace that it was probably full of bugs and field mice, and who knew what else. With Hellbringer’s engine off, the night around them was alive with the sounds of insects whirring, crickets chirping, and wind feathering through the grass, bringing the fresh scent of green things growing.

Greyson’s boots scuffed on the gravel as he left the side of the road and swished through the tall grass. As if sensing her discomfort, he held out his hand to her. “It’s okay. Come on.”

She took his strong hand, drawing confidence from his presence, and stepped up onto the grass. It came up to her knees. She held up Salem’s heavy little lead box in her other hand. “This is far enough. I need to sit down to do this.”

Without a word, Greyson stripped off his leather jacket. He laid it down at her feet and spread it out like a picnic blanket, motioning for her to sit.

“No, I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. We don’t have much time.” Greyson pulled her close, and suddenly she felt overwhelmed by his presence. His eyes burned red in the night, much brighter than the stars twinkling overhead. Then she was kissing him, pulling him to her, holding him tight.

She was weak in the knees when she finally pulled away. She looked up into his eyes and tried to find some words to express what she felt. Everything was happening so fast. The wraiths. The scroll. The shop being destroyed. Again.

She didn’t want to cast this spell. She didn’t want to run for her life anymore. She just wanted to be with Greyson. Here, now, beneath the stars. She wanted the rest of the world to just stop hurtling toward oblivion, just for one night. Was that too much to ask?

She opened her mouth to say all of these things, and her phone chimed in her pocket, destroying the moment. Suddenly, she didn’t notice the stars or the quiet breeze or the warmth of Greyson’s strong chest anymore. Now there was only the ugly metal box in her hand and the fact that the clock was ticking. The wraiths would catch up if they stayed here too long.

“Well, at least we have cell signal.” She checked her phone. It was a text from Rane.

Barn is empty. U R good to go.

She showed it to Greyson, who nodded grimly. “Are you ready?” he said.

She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway. With a nervous sigh, she opened Salem’s box.