Roksana, Berta, and Ewelina joined forces on that to cast a spell called Passage, which unlocked the padlock and the dead bolt on the doors as well. Some clanking and rattling ensued as Martyna unwrapped the chains, and Malina told us all to cast kinetic wards on ourselves before entering.
“We don’t know if they’re armed or what might be down there. It might not be an entirely human threat.”
That was the first time I’d heard that interpretation, but I’m glad she said something. I cast the protective ward and was bathed in a cone of violet light that filtered the world in shades of indigo.
Martyna hauled open the doors in a scrape of dust, and we filed in, daggers out, and immediately heard a chorus of cursing coming from downstairs. It was utterly black inside because the cutting of the cables not only disabled phones but robbed them of electricity. We had to pause to cast Night Vision, which showed us the dim contours of walls and staircases, but very little else. We were in a foyer or lobby with staircases heading up and down. We headed down, with Klaudia taking point, and I was in the middle of the pack; the violet light from our wards aided us somewhat as our eyes adjusted.
The muffled shouting increased abruptly in volume as Klaudia opened a door at the bottom of the staircase that gave egress to the basement area. We rushed in to shouts of “What is that?” and “Who is that?” because our wards were visible to the humans down there.
Had it only been humans, we would have had little trouble.
But there was something else hiding underground, and once we presented ourselves as targets, they attacked, horned and hooved.
I did not understand the fullness of that at first—I got rammed and it staggered me, but the ward did redirect much of the force at the attacker, and he pinged off me like a pinball on a purple bumper. They kept coming, however, but on their second attack, we were ready and bloodied some of them, got a better look at what lunged out of the darkness, and heard their bleats of pain when we stabbed them: They were fauns. Or satyrs, as I first thought, because that was the word I most commonly associated with chimeras made of man and goat.
I was not the only one to mutter a “What the fuck?” under my breath, because while this manifestation or infestation certainly explained the deep weirdness we’d sensed about the place in our divination, no one could fathomwhysuch creatures would be lurking in a Warsaw basement.
Upon their third advance, the fauns demonstrated that they could learn: They came up close and reached out with their hands to grapple with us—specifically attempting to disarm us. One simply approached me with slow steps and watched my knife hand the whole time, no eye contact, just waiting for me to strike. I straight kicked him in the face with my left booted foot to make him understand the knife wasn’t all he needed to worry about, and he blinked, snorted blood, and grinned as he kept coming.
I feinted with the knife overhead, and his hands shot out to intercept but annoyingly tracked as I spun and tried to stab from the other side. He caught my forearm in an iron grip, bent down, and sank his teeth into my flesh, all of these movements too slow to trigger the kinetic ward.
I screamed, dropped the knife, and wasn’t the only witch screaming. My sisters were also suffering similar attentions.
But I heard Malina say, “Fuck this,” before a searing flash of light assailed our eyes in the gloom. She had summoned her hellwhip—an arcane weapon that could dispatch most anything unprotected by god-level wards. It was the equivalent of igniting a lightsaber in a room full of foam rubber swords, and normally she wouldn’t summon it where humans could be tagged with it, but so far we’d seen no humans, only fauns.
She swept it in a counterclockwise scything motion, and the white-hot blade of it juicily separated human torsos from goatish nethers, ropy intestines and bean-shaped kidneys spilling across the floor and bleats of agony and dismay filling the space as the fauns splashed into pools of their own blood.
The whip licked harmlessly off our wards, and Malina swept the whip back once more before flicking her wrist and allowing it to loll in electric menace.
“Someone cast Starlight, please,” she said, and I think it was Patrycja who obliged, calling down the brilliance of the Zorze to shine from her hands and penetrate the dark, revealing a crowd of humans farther back in the basement, all cringing away from the sudden glare. They had on useless headsets and stood near little cubbies arranged on a couple of long tables. We also saw shelves and a furnace and several water heaters—it was fortunate that Malina’s hellwhip hadn’t burst any of those. “Charm them into submission,” she said. “We’ll take our time interrogating them.”
Stepping over and through the viscera of goat-footed men, I hoped at least one of the humans could explain the fauns’ presence, because it made no sense for them to be there. They were creatures out of Greco-Roman myth. They should be pursuing naiads and dryads on the slopes of Mount Olympus, not slumming in a Polish basement, guarding a criminal call center.
Each of the sisters had a feature that she used to charm others; it was primarily a defensive measure, because no one lashed out at someone they liked, but it could also get people to talk because they wanted to please us. Malina had long, straight golden hair that was nearly irresistible, Klaudia used her lips, and Ewelina actually used her right ear, which I thought a bizarre move, but there was no denying its mesmerizing effectiveness. Like many of the other young witches, I used my eyes.
But I didn’t go straight to the cluster of frightened men and women, because I was curious about the shelves—why were they even there? What was being stored on them?
Cardboard boxes of indeterminate contents. A dusty sleeve for carpenters’ tools—hammer, screwdrivers, pipe wrench. And a human head.
Wait—
Yes, a head. A woman’s head situated on a small marble base. She herself looked to be of marble, so pale and bloodless was her skin, but she had eyes and real nostrils, not the dead white of statues, and there was a shy blush to her lips, at least. Her dark hair might be a wig, but it looked real. And sheblinked.
I froze and locked my gaze on her, trying to determine whether I was really seeing this or if my brain was playing a cruel joke born of hormones and stress chemicals.
But no, her eyes were tracking the movements of my sisters,and when she noticed me staring at her, she returned my gaze coolly.
I stepped closer, pouring some energy into my eyes, attempting to charm her.
“And who might you be?” I asked.
The disembodied head blinked a couple of times, gave me the tiniest smirk on one side of her face, but made no reply.
“Come on, tell me your name,” I said with all the persuasion I could muster.
The smirking intensified.
And so did the din of voices from the scammers: They should have been quietly falling under our coven’s sway as our charms hijacked their minds, but instead they were resisting—not physically, because they were unarmed and we still very much were, but rather with spirited suggestions that we perform anatomical impossibilities.
