The cave was about ten by twelve, composed of solid rock. Not smooth stone, like from water seepage through limestone, but jagged and sharp, as if created by a rock fall long ago. The roof was a solid layer of rock, as were the two sides and the back wall. The wall where she held herself was smooth too, but the rocks inside, on the floor, were broken, splintered, shattered rock, as was the area to either side of her. It appeared that the cave had once been completely enclosed on four sides, and the wall at the waterfall had caved in. The glowing moss covered everything, even the broken rock, which suggested that the front wall had shattered some time ago. Years? A few decades?
The stone beneath her hand was even more powerful than the rock on the surface of the ground had been. The rock beneath her seemed to reach up inside her and share its power.
She pulled herself up and sat, her butt still in the water, on a mossy smooth rock and placed both hands, palms down, on the stones. Power,amazing power, was stored in the stone. Power of the earth, stored in the cave itself, power that seeped into her body, healing her muscles, helping her to breathe better than since Evangelina had used her own power against her and crushed her with a boulder.
Liz would have expected it to feel cold inside the cave, what with water evaporation and being underground, but it was improbably warm. Not steamy, though she wasn’t chilled, even being naked and wet. When her breath was totally smoothed out, she swiveled her legs inside and stood, stepping into the cave. The roof was eight or nine feet tall. The interior was lit all around with the phosphorescent moss. It was like a playground of energy for a stone witch. Water slid down the stones everywhere, between the tiny phosphorescent mosses covering every surface. It made soft trickling sounds like a high-pitched percussion instrument, groundwater weeping down from rains above. The lower-pitched sound of the falls just behind her was a deeper thrum with splashy midrange notes. The sounds of water everywhere were magnified, echoing like music in a grand hall.
Tears that might have been joy or peace came to her eyes and she blinked them away, not wanting to miss a thing. Peace flowed through her. A calm she had never experienced. Inebriating and yet serene.
For Liz, keeping her witch power locked down had been a necessity all her life. When she was a kid, some people still considered witches to be uniformly evil, and losing control meant proving them right. Losing control meant exposure and being ostracized by friends. With the name Everhart, people already knew she came from a witch family, so they were always watching her and her sisters, watching for the slightest error. She had learned early on to not give in to anger at the taunts of bullies, to not fight back with her magic. She had held herself aloof, her power deeply locked down, as all witches did.
But this much power all around her, flowing into the soles of her feet, into her lungs with each breath, gently pressing on those internal walls, was urging that locked-down-something inside her to give way, to open up, to accept all the energies around her. To be free. She laughed, a sputtering sound that echoed through the cave.
Her body filled with the power. More and more. Without an amulet, using just raw power, she opened aseeingworking, a witch working thatlet her see energy. She had never opened one before without an amulet to direct the energies. The power all around glowed richly into her, around her, beneath her, and she realized she had to be standing directly over that ley line. An unmapped, untapped ley line.
“Holy...” she whispered. “Holy, holy,holy...”
Placing her feet carefully between sharper rocks littering the cave floor, she moved deeper inside. Her eyes adjusted to the dim green light, and she saw, at the back, a small area of cave floor that was without stone. It looked like a puddle of mud. Quicksand? The groundwater had to go somewhere, and maybe not all of it ran out into the pool. At the very back of the cave was a different mass, one not covered with moss, yet, in herseeingworking, it glowed brighter than the rocks with ley line energies. She eased closer. It looked like a bundle of sticks.
And then she saw the skull.
Chapter Five
Eli
Eli positioned the wire cooking rack over the surprisingly efficient pile of kindling. Liz had used the old seating ring he’d noticed and created a firepit in the center, placing the stack of larger deadfall logs to the side of the inner ring. It looked like enough to make it through the night. He checked the leaf canopy overhead. It was far enough above to be safe from sparks, there had been rain two days ago, and there was no burning ban in place. Liz had also cleaned up the campsite so there wouldn’t be unintended fire. Not bad for a weak witch with no survival skills. He wasn’t sure what he felt about that, except maybe satisfied. Relieved. Something. And she’d been totally safe under a portable magicalhedgewhen he had to leave her on the trail. Even he didn’t have ahedgein his arsenal.
He got a fire going using her lighter and the kindling, poured water to heat in his camping pan, and set bottles of water out. He added two dehydrated dinners and foil packages of salmon and nuts. He placed hisweapons within easy reach and laid out the bedrolls. Not close enough that it looked like he was expecting anything.
But.
Yeah. But.
Eli preferred women who liked guns. Even Jane, with all her magic, used and appreciated mundane weapons and trained hard to keep up her proficiency levels. Liz found guns amusing, saying it was because she had defensive and offensive weapons he didn’t. He’d never seen her display any magical weapons and he had to admit to a certain amount of curiosity.
The military had been trying to get covens to work with them for decades, but except for a few covens that charged fortunes to create anti-magic-spell armor, and a rare outlier witch misfit with delusions of grandeur, they hadn’t been very successful. Hitler had done better, but he’d been willing to use methods to secure cooperation that Uncle Sam hadn’t. Sooo. What did Lizzie have that he didn’t know about?
Her amusement and that vagueness made her intriguing.
He squatted over the fire and rearranged the kindling, adding a larger piece of log. He then pulled his machete and used it to cut up one of the longer deadfalls she had dragged over. He placed it on the pit, the splintered end in the flames, the longer end hanging over the rock edge, to be pushed closer to the flames as needed. The burning wood smelled good. He leaned back on his bedroll and drank a bottle of water. Tonight he would need to bring water from the waterfall, purify it, and refill the bottles, but for now he was content to wait.
Without losing any of the situational awareness that active combat had provided him, he closed his eyes.
Liz
It was a partially mummified human corpse, bones showing through. It was propped upright by a small circle of stones, knees high, as if in the fetal position, and was bound with rotted vines and rotted, braided ropes. The skeleton had black hair in a long braid that lay across its shoulderbeside a necklace of stone beads. The skeleton was held together with a rotting plant material, cloth, and a strange belt or chain that appeared to be made of metal plates with odd tabs holding them together. The metal was old and pitted. By the light of the moss and the ley line, and with herseeingworking, she could tell it was heavily coated with verdigris. That made it copper.
An ancient skeleton bound with copper was not something that belonged here, and it should have fallen apart ages ago. She touched a nearby rock and felt with her magic through the rocks until her stone magic touched the bones. Ancient,ancientbones. Far older than she expected. Thousands of years they had sat here, in this wet, dark place. And yet they weren’t rotted through to dust. That meant magic had been a part of its burial.
There had been a copper age in the Americas between 4000 and 2000 BCE, mined from somewhere up north. But even at its height, copper had been extremely valuable and rare, especially here in the Appalachians. The copper miners up north had been tribal people who had mined the ore, smelted it into purity using a method long lost to the ages, and made implements out of it. They’d been up near the Great Lakes. Maybe Upper Michigan? This copper had likely been traded for a lifetime of valuables. And it was buried here, with a skeleton that had sat here for millennia.
Out of the top of the skull was another piece of copper, this one like a narrow ax blade. She edged closer, avoiding the mud puddle. Yeah. It was an ax blade. It vaguely reminded her of the ancient ax carried by the mummified man from the Alps. Ötzi.
Liz breathed out a laugh and breathed in power. So much power passing into her through the air and the soles of her feet, until she felt a little light-headed. Drunk. Power, this much power, was a drug to witches. Liz knew that, had been taught that, but saying no to the power felt... wrong. And stupid. And...
This was what she wassupposedto feel like. This wonderful. This powerful.
The copper sticking out of the skull had no handle, but she spotted the rotting stick resting on the mummy’s shoulder. That suggested that the ax had pierced the skull and been driven deep. And left there. The factthat some ancient tribal people had left the ax behind, a treasure to the ancients, meant it was supposed to stay there. In place. Like a sacrifice or something.
