Twice-bedamnedandthrice-bedamnedwere some of their grandmother’s favorite cuss words. It spoke to family and witch power and a history of protecting the world with the gifts given to them. Liz nodded. “Right.” She looked at the demon. Its shattered bone was pressing into thehedge of thorns, widening a dark brown spot of weakness. Her sister’shedgewas failing. “How long to full moonset?”
“Not long. Make it work.”
“Thanks for the leaves.” Liz slid her power into the earth and fast back to the cave. With her magic in the cave, and with her magic in the firepit, Liz began weaving the twigs and leaves together with her power, simulating the original biological material. Drawing on the power of the ley line, she picked up the small stones of her amulet necklace and added them to the mix. As the power grew stronger, she added more stones, those still inside the cave. When she had the power all in one place, just below the surface of the cavern floor, she began to weave in the floor and the walls and the ceiling of the stone cave. Granite, marble, a mixed jumble of massive rocks. Unlike Liz, whoever created the first binding hadn’t been a stone witch as she understood the concept. Their coven—had there even been one?—had worked magic in ways that felt foreign and like a babble of magic, mixed colors and textures, like a yarn shop hit by a tornado, the skeins all tangled together. The practitioners had used water and green things and woven ropes made of the sinews of animals for the binding. They had putstasisworkings on the greenery, the sinews, and the stone walls, but the workings had become poorly connected over the centuries. With the cave-in at the entrance, everything had finally begun to rot. Disintegrate. And because of her, it was happening faster and faster. The original binding was nearly torn asunder.
Liz pulled the last remaining power from the firepit, from her own stones and amulets, and from her own flesh. She wove it all together into thebindingworking. She pulled on the moonstones and the moon-power and heard Cia gasp.
With all the power in her grasp, Liz sank deeply into the ley line. Thepower had a structure, a shape. It was composed of circles and lines, dots and waves, knotted bunches of them all together that looked like weavings. The magic in it moved fast. She had a momentary worry that if she fell in, the energies there would take her through to another time and place. As if space and time were all screwed up here, in the ley line and the dark cave.
She braided and wrapped and twisted strands of the ley line together with her own magic, with Cia’s moon magic, and created a strand as dense and heavy as a bridge-spanning steel cable. She braided another. And another.
When she had three cables of power she whispered, “Bone.”
Cia put the first piece of bone between her fingers. It burned, like handling a coal from an old, superhot fire.
Liz added the copper rectangle, shoving it under the dressing, pressing them together. She forced them hard against her lower arm, near her elbow, into the bloody mess there. The power of the ley line scorched through her body, fast, filling the stones of the firepit, filling her amulets, filling Cia’s moonstone amulets.
Cia made a different sound, a breath of relief that let Liz know how close they had been to losing the protection of thehedge. And that it was fully strong again. She added the rest of the bone fragments, pressing them deep into her blood.
Closing her eyes, so her mind could follow only the energies, she pulled in the frayed threads of the ancientbindingworking. Using the copper and the bones still in the pit of the cave, she rewove the old working with the ley line. When it was strong, when it incorporated the entire cave, every rock in it tied into the ley line, she followed the last thread of the original binding back to the demon. She began to tug.
The demon screamed.
Her voice shaking, she said, “Cia, speak the words for ‘Must remain in place.’ ”
“Ní mór fós i bhfeidhm,”Cia said.
“Eli,” Liz said, a bit stronger. “Now.”
She felt it the moment the holy water hit the demon. It lost its cohesiveness. The mud exploded outward, over thehedge, over the clearing. Itexploded everywhere. Foul stinking filth, the rot of an abattoir. Shaddock cursed. The others said other things.
The demon roared and screamed, and it was the sound of bones breaking, the sound of death and dying and loss and fury. A heated wind blasted through. The scream went higher and higher in pitch until her ears ached with the squeal.
It went silent. Over the deafness of the scream, into the sudden silence, Liz heard a sound likewhooomp, followed by clattering, popping, sizzling. She opened her eyes to see that a heavy layer of mud coated thehedge, dripping down it in globs and runnels. In one narrow open area, she could see out. On the ground beyond thehedgewere bones and sticks and rotted bindings scattered in small piles near the firepit. Everything steamed as if it had been boiled. A slimy, blackened scattering.
With the power of the ley line, Liz drew all the bones together into a net of energies. They scuttled across the ground to the firepit like spiders and rats, gathering into a single clump. “Drop thehedge,” she said.
“You’re gonna regret that,” Cia said. “I knowIam. I loved these jeans.”
Thehedgefell. The demon’s inactivated, rotten mud collapsed onto them. The stench was so intense and foul that Liz nearly lost her hold on the energies. Cia gagged and swore. The filth dripped down their heads and shoulders and backs. Into Liz’s shirt, where it slid down her bare skin. She gagged too. But she kept hold of the binding.
“We need a backpack big enough to hold the bones and my necklace and my battery stone.”
“You can have mine. I’ll never be able to get the stink out,” Cia said.
Her twin stepped from the circle, shaking off the filth in spatters of grossness. She emptied out her once-pink backpack and placed it near the bones. “How are you planning to get the bones into the pack without us touching them?”
“Eli, you still got gloves?” Liz asked, knowing the answer.
Eli pulled on a pair of gloves from his kit and knelt beside her. “Ready?” he asked.
“Go for it. Don’t let any of them touch your skin.”
“Roger that.”
Liz watched as he carefully lifted and placed each bone into thebackpack, making certain that nothing would shift and touch his skin as he worked. When he had all the longer bones and the fragments from the muddy earth, Liz added the small shards from her bandages and dropped in the copper link. The magic binding clicked into place with an audible sound and an internal vibration she felt in her blood-cursed flesh and deep into her bones. “Now we put it back,” she said.
Eli zipped the backpack closed, pulled off the gloves, tucked them into a pocket, and lifted the backpack straps by one hand. After testing whether it would hurt him, he tossed the backpack over his shoulder and slung the shotgun forward. He held out his other hand to her and, careful of her injuries, helped her to her feet.
