“Always. The holy water is in my backpack.” He nodded to the backpack outside the firepit. He reached inside his T-shirt and pulled out a chain. On the end dangled a crucifix, the kind with the bloody dead Christ on it. The demon stepped back at the sight and roared as if Eli had shot it.
This demon, who had no knowledge of the Holy Land, hated crosses. Interesting. Liz said, “Captain America with a crucifix. I didn’t know you’re Catholic.”
“We’ll talk about religion later. After a better date, because this one sucks right now.”
Liz laughed and said, “Amen to that.” She slung more blood on to thehedge. It was her blood, and her hedge and so… that was good to know. “Now shut up while I try to pull in more power.” She lifted her necklace and ran her unbloodied fingers through the beads and amulets. “Cross worked. Okay, let’s try this.” She chose a single depleted amulet and wiped her blood over it. The amulet was a silver cross with a bit of ancient glass in the center, glass from the Holy Land, taken from a two thousand year old archeology site. She looked at Eli in the darkness. “Oh. Prayer. If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“I believe. About the size of a grain of a mustard seed, but that’s supposed to be enough.” When Liz didn’t reply, he said, “If prayer will hurt that thing, then I’ll pray. I’ve seen Jane pray and I’ve seen her when she doesn’t pray. And I grew up with a grammaw who prayed like a machinegun. When grammaw prayed, there was a difference in her and her world.”
The demon eased closer and once again placed the sharp bone on the working. Thehedgeshivered at the point of demon contact. That small spot glowed instantly red and then began to dim, much faster this time. The color change went from red to a glowing orange, as the power of the working began to fade.
Eli tightened his hold her. “Better hurry.”
“Yeah. I see that.” Liz went limp. She started searching through the upper layer of soil for a stone close to the surface, trying to see what was there and what wasn’t. Searching through this ground for rocks to draw power from wasn’t easy because there was a lot of rotted organic matter mixed in with sand and microscopic rocks, and there was a layer of clay about eighteen inches under the ground. The layer of clay was smooth and clean and dense, and it resisted her magics. She pried and pressed, and eventually resorted to tapping with her magic, hunting for the vibrations in the rocks buried in the clay. It took too long, but she found an oval one about six inches below the clay surface. Then another. Her connection to the stones was iffy, like an old radio signal skipping in and out, but they gave her a bit of respite and let her draw power into her battery stone and into the ring of stone.
When she could breathe again, she tried to figure out why she was having so much trouble searching through the ground. She had pushed through clay before, so it had to be because all the power in the entire area had been tied up in binding the demon. She searched lower, out, in small, six inch spirals, draining the power from the energies of the earth stored in each stone. She found a larger rock out, toward the leyline. Another. The clay, with its weird draining energies thinned and she hit dirt again. Out from here, the clay was just in patches. Her pain decreased and her breath came easier. Thehedgestrengthened.
“You got this, Lizzie,” Eli whispered in her ear. “It’s working.”
Wending her way through the ground, she moved closer and closer to the leyline beneath the pool.
“Put my hand on one of the rocks,” she whispered. “Make sure there’s blood contact.” Her body jostled. She was sitting cradled between Eli’s thighs, her back against his abdomen. She realized that he was still holding her upper body upright. His hand felt hot when it took hers and squeezed the puncture site open again before placing it on to a rock. “Keep me bleeding,” she said, as she skipped a longer distance to a more remote boulder. The jump this time was closer to eighteen inches and she felt winded just making that leap.
“Would my blood help?” he whispered.
“The prayer of a righteous man,” she quoted, thinking it might be from a long ago Sunday School scripture.
She felt an incredible heat as Eli mixed his blood across her fingers and onto the rocks around them. “There is ‘Power in the Blood,’ ” he said. “That’s an old hymn my grammaw used to sing.”
“Sing it,” Liz breathed.
“My grammaw was as anti-witch as they came. The idea that a witch would cut herself and have me sing about the blood of the redeemer would either make her throw something at me or hug you. Maybe both.” Eli chuckled as if he hadn’t a care in the world and said, “Karaoke in the middle of a magical battle. This one’s for you, Grammaw.” The first notes were as mellow as the moonlight teasing through the canopy of burned leaves overhead as Eli began to sing the old hymn. The tones filled the clearing, vibrating in the air, and as Liz breathed in that air, she smiled and relaxed against him.
Thehedgegrew stronger. The cross amulet grew stronger. There was power in Eli’s faith and Eli’s song. Even if he didn’t know it.
Eli
Where to cutyourself when helping a witch keep up a magical protection from a demon hadn’t been included in his extensive military training, so he was winging it. Unlike the witch, he chose to make small slices in the thin skin of the thinner part of his wrist, not his fingertips. The skin was thicker on fingers, had thousands more nerve endings, so it hurt more, made it difficult for him to use weapons properly, and healed much slower. Since it worked for him, he tried it on her. Cutting a comrade-in-arms was a new experience for him. He’d taken out his fair share of enemies with blades. He’d picked up a soldier’s leg and loaded it into a helo with him once when the guy stepped on an IED, but he’d never actually cut a noncombatant on purpose, except to save a life.
He sang until he ran out of remembered hymns and his voice went hoarse from lack of moisture. He checked his cell every thirty mikes, watching for progress reports texted by Alex. When thehedgebegan to fail again, he cut them both again and mixed their blood onto the rocks. But that didn’t seem to be enough. He hunted through all his pockets until he found five plastic-wrapped candies that he kept on hand for patients whose blood sugar dropped. They were old and the plastic was adhered to the candy, but it was better than nothing.
Around the gooey, plastic-y candy, again he sang.
For three hours, Eli cut them both and sang hymns about blood, several songs over and over, until his voice was only a whisper and he had to open another disappearing candy to keep his mouth moisturized. And he cut and cut, not looking at his backpack with the water outside the circle. Not looking at the other bottles tantalizingly out of reach next to their supper. They bled over rocks, and he held Lizzie. He reopened wounds until he needed stitches, wrapping each wound when it got too deep from the repeated cuts and moving onto a different location.
Finally, Lizzie stirred and sat up. Her voice was as dry as his when she said, “I’ve drained all the energy I can from the boulders. The leyline is just beyond the last boulder I can reach, but I can’t tap into it from underground. Stupid thing just sits there, glimmering with all that power, tied up in the working that bound the demon.” She laughed softly, a hoarse, mocking sound. “If I had a full coven of five or seven, with a properly constructed witch circle, reaching it would have been a piece of cake. Instead, it’s like a mirage. Close. And yet not really there.”
Around them, thehedgebegan to waver again at the point of contact with the demon’s broken bone. Eli didn’t tense around her. Didn’t give away what he’d seen.
“See this?” she asked. Lizzie pointed down, indicating the bright energies of the silver box. It was glowing in herseeingworking, a shocking scarlet.
“I see it.”
“Wanna know what’s funny?” she asked.
“Sure. Tell me a joke.”
“Not what I meant, but okay. Why not? Knock knock.”
