“Study it. It was moving fast at first, like a spirit through time and space, but it slowed. It almost feels like, I don’t know, as if it’s physically present in reality, but also still tethered to its prison. When it entered the campsite, it almost looked as if it was dragging itself across the ground.”
“Okay. In my own vision, I see mud and bright brown-orange flames, maybe like sasquatch if bigfoot was made out of Play-doh, set on fire, and bound in twisted reeds and rope. The rope is disintegrating.” He couldn’t protect Lizzie from a demon. He’d seen what it took to stop and bind a demon. He’d watched the footage over and over again. One had nearly killed Jane, and she’d had help from witches and maybe an angel. It had sucked.
“Reed ropes,” Lizzie said. “There was a skeleton in the cave, and it had been wrapped in what felt like—looked like—green willow-bark rope, root-rope, and maybe rope made from the tendons of animals. I’m seeing frayed ends in myseeingworking, as if… as if it tore itself away, but…” She held up her hand and he took it again. “Tell me what you see.”
“I see a line of green energies trailing back along the path where the thing’s walking,” Eli said. “It keeps jerking one leg as if there’s something still pulling it back.”
“I think, somehow it’s still bound in the cave,” Lizzie said, “but not by much. Oh.” She stopped. “I think the skeleton was wrapped with copper.”
Copper was a precious metal. It had to mean something. Something he could use. By feel, since the moon hadn’t risen yet and even the stars were hidden by the tree cover, Eli changed out his ammo, replacing traditional lead ten-millimeter rounds with silver-lead composite rounds. Nothing would stop a demon, but if it had an affinity to precious metals, then maybe the silver would slow it down. He didn’t bother to hope. He did what he could. “Tell me what you remember about the skeleton,” he said, his voice flat. “Everything. No detail is unimportant, even if it’s half guesswork.”
She described the position of the body, the biological bindings, the metal chain and how the flat rectangular copper plates were attached to create a chain rope. She described the necklace of stone beads and the single black braid. “I think … it was dressed in clothes like tribal people. Definitely not European, so, maybe like the clothes local tribal people might have worn before the European invasion and colonization. Some kind of woven, coarse fabric and tanned hide.”
He took her hand again, saying, “Let me see again. When she opened theseeingworking, he watched the demon and said, “Still sasquatch. You?”
“Yes. Just lumpy energy.”
“What else? What else did you see in the cave?”
She closed her eyes, seeming totally unconcerned with the appearance of a demon in the campsite with them. Crazy witch woman.
“Maybe a bow and a quiver of arrows leaning against the back wall of the cave? Beaded moccasins? The necklace, or maybe two, were all stone, no glass beads. Feathers in its hair.”
“Stone beads. Stone witch? Like you?”
“Huh. Okay, that’s odd. I was thinking fire witch wrapped in mud. The stone necklace was the only thing not glowing with leyline power.” She took a slow breath of what sounded like excitement in the pitch dark. “Maybe they had been infused with null energies. Or even death energies, like a death witch might make.”
“Do you see the necklace in with the bones?”
“Hard to tell with all the mud and bones sticking out all over it. It looks like the entire human skeleton could be sticking through the mud.” She took a slow breath.
Eli had not a single idea how to stop this thing. Except it was made of real stuff. Physical stuff. Not pure energy trying to manifest as real. That was different. He dialed Alex to update him.
Liz
Liz pulledon all her knowledge of demon lore which was pitifully small. The demon was either a fire demon, partially trapped and tied to the cave and the leyline, or the skeleton buried in the cave had been a fire practitioner, one that had been tied to the demon either through possession, or through becoming a sacrifice. Not many fire witches survived to adulthood. When they came into their powers, they usually burned themselves up—spontaneous human combustion—or set their family on fire and had to be put down. But the body in the cave had been adult-sized.
In the woods, back along its trail, along the path of the faint green binding, another dead tree went up in flame.
Eli asked, “Can you alter the hedge to resist high temps?”
“Maybe. But that means it’ll burn through my reserves faster.”
“How do we kill it?”
“You don’t kill demons. Impossible.”
“Jane did.” Jane. Not Janie. Maybe Jane when he was talking about the warrior, Janie when he was talking about his adopted sister? It was cute how he divided up the two parts of her.
Liz released Eli’s hand. Jane the warrior had killed her sister, Evangelina, and the demon Evie had called. Or rather, had bound the demon back into hell. Either way, the important part was that Jane had killed Evie. That should have been the coven’s job, but they hadn’t been willing enough to kill their sister, or powerful enough to stop the demon. And killing Evie had proved beyond any doubt that an Everhart had called the demon to the earth. That act had destroyed Liz’s coven, wreaked havoc on her family, tarnished their rep in the witch community, and shattered her faith in the older sister she had revered. And even though Liz knew—with the rational part of herself— that Jane had done the only thing she could to stop the evil of Evangelina, there was a small, mean, little part of her soul that hated Jane for that. The rest of her feelings were still a mishmash of anger, sorrow, grief, and worthlessness, unable to fix anything her sister had done.
She shoved those feelings away and pulled her thoughts from the past. Demons loved hate. It would use negative emotion to weaken her. To take over more than the blood-taint on her flesh and her soul. If she slipped into hate, the demon could take her over completely.
“No rifle? No steel blade, brought by Europeans? No cross used in the binding?” Eli asked.
He was still talking about stuff in the cave. “No,” she said.
“So, by its accessories, we can deduce it was trapped pre colonization, in the American copper age. Somewhere between two and four thousand years ago.”
