Blood War

  Blood War

  Russell Moon

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  I am running, hard, as hard as my body will…

  Chapter 2

  I can do a lot of stuff now, but apparently…

  Chapter 3

  When I wake I am still facedown on the bed,…

  Chapter 4

  What the seal leads me to minutes later is not…

  Chapter 5

  “They have one ring,” he says sadly, wearily. “Everything is…

  Chapter 6

  “There it is,” my father says as we stop on…

  Chapter 7

  The boat pulls up to the seashell-strewn beach that now…

  Chapter 8

  I am standing at the grass-capped, sleep-eyed entrance to the…

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  I am running, hard, as hard as my body will go, but that is not fast enough. I’m running down the road between my house and the Spences’. Sweat and dust are in my eyes, as are fleeting, maddening visions of my dog. My poor dead dog, lying in my kitchen moments ago. As are visions of my mother.

  They have Eleanor. I run faster, if that is possible, my feet pounding deep indents in the dirt. They have my mother. The coven, the witches, who first showed me what I was. Whom up to now I have been unsure of—whom I have been unable to pin down on one side or the other—good or evil, friend or foe. They have made themselves known at last.

  And I can’t help but think of the things they could do to her, easily. They are capable of everything.

  I shake the images, and the knowledge that it is all somehow my fault, and push the last yards down the road, through the heat, to the house. The sleepy, enchanting house that was so full, the last time I was here, of tinkling crystal dinnerware and charming conversation and then the unspeakable secrets I found upstairs. I should have known then. I should have.

  I don’t slow down as I approach. I fly through the gate, hit the porch stairs, and pound on the front door like I am going to kill it.

  “Get out here!” I scream like a madman, still smashing my fist on the door. “Get out here, Spence. Eartha! Eartha, get out here.” My voice is cracking with the fear that I’ve missed something. That I’m too late.

  I wait. I stop pounding and try to listen for whatever I can hear inside the house. My breathing. That is all I can hear, and it sounds like a diesel train.

  I resume pounding on the door. “This is your only chance,” I scream. “You hear me? This is the only time I will offer. I want my mother, right now. You will bring her to me right this minute. If I do not get her back now…”

  Really, I have no finish to that. I have no plan, I have no great ideas about what I can or will do.

  But I do know this: I can, and will, do something unspeakable. If they dare harm Eleanor in any way…I sense what is possible.

  Mercy will not be possible.

  “Goddammit,” I shout as I go back to it and hit the door a monstrous blow with both fists at once. I let out a roar and feel the ground rumble slightly.

  I don’t know if it is my great princely power, but the door surrenders completely, popping right off its hinges and crashing down into the front foyer of the house.

  And then I see.

  I am powerless. I am so completely without power.

  The house is in ruins. As I stand in the doorway, hands still up defensively in front of me, I see there is no one here to fight. There is no Eleanor, as far as I can see. No Dr. Spence or his daughter, Eartha, who I now believe are the worst of the lot. No horde of screaming witches coming to overwhelm me. And worse—if there can be a worse—is that the house appears to have been deserted for a long time. Years, maybe.

  This is stunning. It is all but impossible. This house was alive a day or two ago, a handsome house, a plush house. I’m tempted to believe I have lost my mind. But if the past few months have taught me anything, it is that insanity is a privilege I haven’t yet earned. No, I’m not insane. It’s just that it appears immediate history has been erased. I shudder.

  I walk in, shaking, apprehensive, still poised for battle. The house smells of years of mildew and closed windows. Thick layers of dust rest on just about everything. I creep from the front hallway to the dining room, where I myself, and Eleanor too, sat one night not so long ago—with the powerful Dr. Spence, with lovely, scary, lovely Eartha. Everything in the room is covered with drop cloths, heavy canvas things protecting the furniture from the decay seeping in from all directions, falling down from above. I take a peek under the cloth that is thrown over the table and chairs.

  They are completely different. Unlike the Spences’ light, bright, and new-looking furnishings, everything here is dark, old, soaked through with creeping rot. I put my hand on the back rest of a chair, maybe the one where I would have been sitting that night, and a chunk of wood comes off in my hand like I am breaking off a piece of cake.

  I leave the dining room and head up the stairs, looking to see, I guess, if this is just one more elaborate sleight of hand, if the coven and my mother are really holed up upstairs.

  But upstairs is more of the same. The elaborate and pristine bathroom is now a husk. Rust stains the cracked enamel of the ancient tub and sink. The floorboards of the hallway groan as I make my way from one deserted bedroom to another, poking my head into each to see blinds closed, dust dancing in the air shot through with slats of light. I take a pause and an extra gulp of air as I push open the door to the final bedroom, the one where I found all the evidence of the blackness of the Spences’ magic—what should have told me all I needed to know, and which I ultimately ignored. The filth-covered walls, the painting of me, my mother, and father—like a shrine.

  My father. He tried to tell me. He may be dead. Again, because of me.

  The door squeaks loudly. It opens onto a scene of utter nothing. There is an old thin mattress on the floor. Wallpaper with designs of steam trains crossing trestle bridges rolling down in great cracked sheets from the walls. A pale yellow rug that looks like it was made fifty years ago.

  I’m grasping the futility of this, and my insides run hot and cold. I want to punish them, and I also want to punish myself. I have spent so much time accepting the bizarre and crazy and ridiculous, yes—but obvious—truth: that I am a witch. That in fact I am the born leader, or Prince or whatever, of a whole race of them. That there are two sides, and that I have had to choose. Now that the choice is clear, it doesn’t do me a shred of good. Because the ones I should have recognized as my true enemies have disappeared and taken everything that matters with them.

  I tear out of the room, go to the end of the hall. I yank open the door to the attic and pound up the short flight of stairs leading to a room that once contained more secrets. An endlessness: this room once stretched on and on forever—magically, inexplicably—without walls or boundaries.

  I don’t even manage to get to the light switch before cracking my head. I find the string, pull it, and find an ordinary, tiny, pitch-ceilinged attic. Light comes through the ceiling in places where the roof is falling away to bits.

  I think I may cry or be sick. But instead when I open my mouth, my voice rumbles out in a scream, such a scream, a scream to every ear within fifty miles, a scream to everyone I have ever known. A scream to wake up my ancestors—father’s and mother’s sides, witch and human alike. Dust begins falling like snow from the rafters as I scream, new cracks opening up in the ceiling, new light spilling into the attic.

  And then I run. I am running after Eleanor, wherever I might find her. Hot-and-cold guilt drives the force of my footfalls almost as much as anything else. It is my fault she is with t
hem—my back-and-forth with allegiances between my father and the coven, my confusion over my father’s warnings to protect her—and I will get her back. There is no safe house for them to hide in. They will be at Arj’s mansion. He’s a leader of sorts, Spence’s right hand, perhaps, and his home a meeting place. They will have to be there.

  I pound the ground along the trail that leads through the woods to Arj’s, running too fast in the heat but not fast enough. Finally, the trail stops. My heart actually speeds up, if that’s possible. I reach the bend in the river road where a small hillock leads up to the grand, impossible house that is Arj’s palace.

  Or, anyway, was.

  I slow down to a trot but keep moving forward, despite what my eyes are telling me. I continue on, through the growing realization.

  Eventually, I walk—up the road, up the incline that would have been Arj’s driveway. I reach the top, panting, my legs tired and rubbery, and I stand. I stand as if I am standing before an actual house. I feel my fists, clenched and banging together.

  Where the house once was, there is now a dense little thicket of old-growth trees. Conifers mix with broadleaf, spruce with birch and beech…. It could becalming almost, the age of it, the familiar smells.

  But calming is what it is not, dammit. Old-growth trees do not just spring up like crocuses where houses used to be. Where is my mother?

  I stand still now, still panting, hands on my hips as I search my head for ideas, solutions. But over several precious minutes, I can’t think of one. The pressure of it makes it even more impossible: I am gripped by fear that they may kill her, though I am logically telling myself they would not. Or rather, they would, but not now. Not before they get at me first, through her—at me and my father.

  My father. I need my father. He is the only possible solution that I can see.

  Where is he? Where, after all, is he? When I last saw him, he was lying in the woods, half-dead. But I feel that he is not where I left him.

  I walk now, through this small but lush bit of forest, reaching out, touching the smooth bark of one birch and then the scratchy surface of a pine. And I am aware of something new but not unfamiliar. In my desperation and need, it is coming to me, communicating to me: an obair, the fabric that holds all of us witches together, that by all accounts gives us our magic, keeps us aware of one another, and enables us to sense one another at all times—even read one another’s thoughts. That is, those of us who know how to use it.

  I hear no words, inside my head or out. But I hear just the same. I hear clearly, but it is not sound. I hear something more akin to scent than to sound. Like the smell of a bakery when you take it all in at once, scones and cannoli and rye bread, honey doughnuts and blueberry muffins and poppy-seed rolls, all of them blended into that one-of-a-kind bakery smell rather than their individual scents.

  I hear the audible version of that. I hear it now, as I search these dwarf woods, this miniature forest, like I am returning to my most familiar place.

  An obair is reaching out toward my father like a pair of antennae and telling me he is not where I left him—bleeding on the ground after his great sacrifice, after doing what it took to prove himself to me. But it tells me nothing more.

  Suddenly my heart sinks right down into my belly and lies there as if I have swallowed a great massive hunk of raw meat.

  What if he is dead? What if he actually, finally is no more and I am left alone to face these monsters, to try to get Eleanor back, unharmed, all on my own?

  I am profoundly saddened now at the thought. But is it truth?

  The coven, that bunch of bastards, clearly has the advantage over me here, as elsewhere. They know an obair backwards and forwards. They have been at it forever, and I’ve been at it for months. I don’t know anything. I may be the Prince, but that doesn’t change the fact that I do not know what the hell I am doing without my dad to show me.

  So where is he?

  Where are you?

  Not that I believe he is in any way perfect, or solidly good. It may be that for him, just as for the coven, this is all about blood and power. The coven wants the impurity of human/witch blood like mine obliterated or at least somehow absorbed into the fold. My father wants a new, mixed breed of witch. And they both want absolute power and control.

  Me? I want my mother. And I’ll spill every kind of blood to get her.

  And I need his help. I can hate him sometimes, I can question and resent him, but he knows all that I do not. He at least claims to care about my mother, and I need him.

  “Where are you?” I say, as if he is standing just next to me. It could, should be enough. But there is no answer.

  I walk on. I do not run anymore because it is exhausting to run when you have to run everywhere, and when you are looking for everyone.

  I am looking for Eleanor. And I am looking for Spence. I am looking for Eartha, and I am looking for my father. I am looking for each and every one of the members of that coven, who—I at least know this for sure now—are as vile and evil as any nightmare ever conceived.

  It is building in me now, anger and outrage and more. Bloodlust. I can taste it, on the air, on my tongue, as I march forward. It does not represent the better part of me. But I also recognize that I am not very bothered by it.

  They have Eleanor. They killed Chuck. Every time my hate needs a recharge, I replay in my mind the picture of my dog, lying in his own blood on the floor. I look down now and I see the great burgundy stain of him spread wide across my chest from where I was holding him.

  I bunch up the front of my shirt in my fist, and I hold it to my nose. I breathe in Chuck.

  My poor Chuck. I am missing him now with a physical ache. I have lived long enough without my father, lived, in fact, without knowing he still existed. But I have never lived without Chuck at my side. He was my familiar, my guardian, like Eartha’s snake or Spence’s hawk. Each witch has one, and he was mine—though for most of my life, I didn’t know it: he was always just there. I have not a single memory of a time without him.

  I stop. I am almost heartened. Because here it is, my first true reminder. Of hope. Of foul, hate-fueled hope.

  It is still here. The ring of standing stones. The coven’s seat of power, in the bold midst of my power, where I last saw my father. They are gone—which is not a surprise. My father is gone too, and again, I am not at all shocked, even considering that no one‚—not even he—could have walked away with such wounds as riddled his body last time I looked. But it is here.

  They can cover their tracks, they can erase history, they can cower and pretend that they never existed. But maybe there are some things they cannot move, cannot hide, cannot erase. Maybe there are certain things bigger than them. I hope.

  I hope I am one of those things.

  The sound, the amorphous sound that I now know is an obair, drives me on. It talks to me now and guides me, even though I do not fully understand it.

  I follow. The urgency is there still, but it’s useless to run. And so I follow at a walk, as it seems no one is to be found anywhere along this journey through old places. It is as if a battleground, fought over and fought over by two celestial armies, has now been abandoned utterly.

  I don’t know where else to go.

  I am left with only one possible choice. The choice I do not want. The choice, I think, I have been avoiding.

  I go home.

  The day has disappeared, and by the time I come up—ever so slowly—on my own house, it is thoroughly dark outside. I am being led on by a bright, shiny blue moon, and by the faint inarticulate sound in my ears.

  I stand at the door for a minute. Then two, then five. Sadness pours through me like I have lead in my veins. I have lost as much as a person can lose, and when I walk through that door I will lose it all over again.

  The words left by the coven, of threat, of war—left there when they knew I had finally chosen my father—are still there in blood on the front door.

  We were afraid that you were
not going to be up to it.

  Shame we were not able to trust you.

  We will keep Eleanor until you are feeling more able.

  I push the door open weakly, go inside reluctantly.

  The scene is precisely what I left when I exploded outside in my murderous, impotent rage hours ago. The floor, walls, windows, everything splattered with the blood. The table, eerier still, is set as it was when I left the house two times ago, when I left Eleanor to her breakfast, and Chuck to watch her.

  And Chuck. There is my Chuck. Lying still on the floor, where I had been holding him, where he was killed.

  Impulse does what impulse does, and I immediately take up my position with him again, sitting right down on the floor and collecting him in my arms. I hold on to him and stroke him for as long as I can bear it.

  Finally—it must be midnight, but I don’t know—I realize I must do it. I get up from the floor, stiff to nearly paralyzed, and I carry my Chuck out to the side yard, just below the back porch, overlooking the babbling water of the stream. I get a spade out from under the porch, and I take my time methodically digging a spacious, comfortable, Chuck-sized grave. It is not lost on me that not too long ago I dug a similar grave with Chuck by my side.

  Again, my fault. Jules. That was when the nightmare began—when I had a kind of witch freak-out and woke from it to find that Jules, my love, my almost-girlfriend, was dead, and that I was some kind of monster. It took so long to believe it. And when I finally did, when my father finally convinced me, I buried a lock of her hair because it was all I had. And I thought that the worst had already happened.

  Now I get to the bottom of this new grave, after a long sweaty time of no-stop, no-think steam-shovel action that feels good to my body and soul, or as close to good as is possible. The bright shiny moon is still beaming down and lighting up, doing a good job of trying to be a sun for me. I am standing in the earth up to my chest, puffing.