Black Magic Bayou (23 page)

Looking back at me, a finger held against his full lips in a
shh
gesture, was Santiago.

He kept one hand on my arm and moved his finger to my lips, shaking his head. I twisted my face away, not liking the faint tingle I felt when he touched me. My heart was pounding a mile a minute, and my adrenaline was through the roof. He was lucky I hadn’t punched a hole in his face.

I wanted to ask what he was doing here and, more importantly, how he’d been able to pull me through a solid wall, but when he saw the questions forming, he gave his head a firm shake.

Apparently this was not a time for talking.

Wherever he’d taken me, there wasn’t a lot of space. I’d been able to pull away from his hold, but beyond that I couldn’t do much more than turn in a circle or go sideways. This didn’t even qualify as a room. If I was going to hazard a guess, I’d say we were probably inside the walls.

The pounding rhythm of the party was muffled but still loud enough I could make out the sounds of shrieking and hoarse laughter. Something shattered, and a boisterous cheer echoed through the room.

Underneath that was a faint, hollow-sounding
tap-tap-tap
.

I shuddered and involuntarily moved a half step closer to Santiago.

The tapping traveled along the wall, coming nearer and nearer to us before stopping for a pause directly in front of where we were waiting. Involuntarily, I covered my mouth and nose with my hands and kept my eyes locked on the area ahead of me. I half-expected Tansy to burst through the wall and yank me out the same way Santiago had yanked me in.

Instead the tapping began again, continuing down the wall and away from us. Soon I couldn’t hear it at all anymore, just the endless noise of the party and the slow creep of footsteps groaning on the boards over our heads.

“
What are you doing here
?” My voice was so quiet he needed to lean in to hear me.

“You said you needed me.”

“I said it would be beneficial for you to hurry up with your spell. I didn’t say I needed a knight in shining armor.”

He breathed out slowly through his nose, his hand drifting up my arm and coming to rest on my shoulder. “And yet, you
did
need me.” His thumb brushed against my jaw, putting the smallest amount of pressure below my ear in a way that made my head feel warm.

I didn’t reply.

I probably would have been okay. Me, Tansy, and the demon that was turning a whole house party into a sex-fueled nightmare. Yup, no help needed, I had this completely under control. Right.

“Where’s Wilder?” I gently removed Santiago’s hand from my face and inched away from him.

“He wasn’t my first priority.”

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness quickly, and I got a good look at him. His hair was brushed back, giving a perfect view of his tattoos, dark against his skin. This time he’d been considerate enough to put on a shirt—a Black Flag tee with holes at the collar—and appeared almost normal.

In his own home, Santiago had been the definition of enchanting and downright mystical. Everything about him had been a perfect example of how a witch should look and live. But here in my world it was a different story.

He could have been any handsome guy on the street. If I overlooked all the tattoos and the smell of magic radiating off him, I wasn’t sure I’d have noticed anything out of the ordinary about him.

The hotness, maybe.

And the way he smelled.

We needed to get out of here.

“The demon got out,” I said.

“I know. And it’s got its claws into everyone here, from what I can tell.”

This confirmed the suspicion I’d had since seeing Tansy part the crowd on the dance floor. There was an otherworldly quality to her now that hadn’t been there before.

Whatever was waiting for us on the other side of the wall, it wasn’t the same Tansy I’d met the previous day.

Which begged the question: which Tansy had been the one in Carlos’s memory? Had the real girl been the one to help kill the victim and steal the cinder block that had killed him, or was it the demon?

An unpleasant feeling in my gut reminded me the demon had been confined to the house—as far as I knew. Meaning demon-Tansy was stuck here. So the real version of Cash’s girlfriend had been the one in the alley and wasn’t nearly as innocent as she pretended to be.

I looked at my phone, which was still clutched in one hand, and saw that I’d lost signal when Santiago rescued me. I had no bars now, and no way to reach out to Cash or Wilder until we were out of…

“Are we
inside
the walls?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

Santiago gave a half shrug and scratched the bare side of his head, below the rune tattoos. Was it my imagination, or did they glow a faint shade of blue when he touched them?

“It’s hard to explain. If I’d just pulled you into the wall, we’d probably be dead. What I’ve done is create a temporary dimensional shift between the living room and the closet under the stairs. We’re in both places, but neither. I’ve sort of…expanded the space that was already there.” He touched the walls on either side and gave a gentle push. Suddenly we had an extra six inches of room.

I poked at one of the walls, awestruck in spite of myself. He’d created space for us by sheer force of will.

“Whoa.”

The walls shrank back towards us, and he winced. “Problem is it’s temporary. Hard to maintain.”

“Oh.” I lowered my hands to my sides and glanced at him. His nose had started to bleed. “
Oh
. Shit, Santiago, move us into the closet or something.”

Before I realized what I was doing, I’d wiped the thin line of red off his face. When I pulled my hand back, my immediate instinct was to lick it clean. I wasn’t sure if that was the wolf or the magic of the house, but either way I resisted the impulse.

I rubbed my finger on the wall instead.

“Thanks.” He touched his fingertips to his nose and gave me a slightly too-knowing smile. “Let’s get out of here before I pass out and we’re both crushed by a dimensional flux.”

That didn’t sound like a great way to go.

He seized me, wrapping one muscular arm around my waist and pulling me close to him. I braced myself against his chest. “Whoa, I—”

My protests vanished as he pressed a palm against one wall and shoved. The wall yielded under his instruction and bowed outwards, forming a bubble of insulation and drywall. He squinted and inched forward, and with one final step we were suddenly out of the wall and inside a closet.

At least I assumed it was a closet. We were surrounded by jackets, boots, and various other things that might be abandoned until the right season rolled around. Even though the space was cramped and enclosed, the air wasn’t nearly as stuffy. I hadn’t realized just how difficult it was to breathe inside the wall, or how claustrophobic it had been. But now that a closet seemed roomy by contrast, I understood how squished we’d been.

“We need to get Wilder and go,” I urged.

“There’s something I need you to see first.”

“Right now?”

Santiago nodded. “You won’t believe me until you see it for yourself.”

“At this point there’s not much I wouldn’t believe.”

“Just come with me.” He took hold of my hand and led me out of the closet. The same girl who had been hitting on Wilder and me earlier was outside the door, making out with the fallback guy who had approached her.

She came up for air long enough to say, “Lucky.”

“Go
home
,” I snapped.

This was hopeless. These idiots would rather go around putting their tongues into the mouths of strangers than to run for the hills. So it was up to me to save their stupid, horny lives.

Fucking hell.

Santiago navigated us through the crowd and into the kitchen, where a girl was up on the kitchen island shaking her hips in a coordinated rhythm to whatever song was now playing. A pack of bystanders surrounded the counter, gazing up at the girl like she was a goddess.

I kept scanning the crowd, hoping to see any sign of Wilder. My phone was buzzing in my pocket, but I couldn’t easily reach it with Santiago holding my hand. He was a man with single-minded focus, and he dragged me through the kitchen to a small door that looked like a pantry. It had once had a padlock on it, but the lock was hanging open.

“Did you do that?” I nodded at the open clasp.

“Yeah.”

I made a mental note to ask him how later, since the lock hadn’t been cut or physically tampered with in any obvious way. That might be a useful trick to have up my sleeve somewhere down the road.

“How long have you been here?” I had been in the house fifteen minutes tops. Either he’d beaten me here or had just arrived. Regardless, I was impressed he’d already managed to pick a lock and save my life.

“I left right after you called. I haven’t been here long.”

He opened the door and held it ajar for me, while keeping an eye on the kitchen. So far no sign of Tansy—or the demon version of her—and no one had tried to stop us.

Still, this felt like the moment in a horror movie where the dumb girl has a chance to run out the back door and go for help, but instead she runs up the stairs.

Or down them, in this case.

A narrow set of wooden steps angled down into a dark basement space. From the smell of damp soil and old wood, I was going to assume this was a storm cellar and not a happy-go-lucky game room sort of basement. Hopefully that meant there wouldn’t be any amorous partygoers down here.

I let my eyes get used to this new darkness before taking the first step. Thankfully this was nothing like the basement I’d gone into at Ezekiel’s, and ten stairs later we were both in a musty crawlspace with a low ceiling.

“Did you bring me to the creepy basement of doom because you could kill me down here and no one would find the body?” I was kidding. Mostly.

“They’d smell you eventually.” Damn. Listen to this guy with the dark humor.

He patted his pockets and withdrew a Zippo lighter, which he ignited with a
shink-flick
noise. I had to readjust to the sudden brightness, but as soon as I was able to blink away the spots of light, I saw what he had brought me here for.

At the farthest wall from us, where the hard-packed dirt floor curved up towards the low-beam ceiling, was a folding card table covered in a short black sheet. A dozen unlit candles were spaced out across the surface, and as I took in the whole scene I noticed even more half-melted pillar candles on the floor. They marked the pentacle points around a chalk circle drawn in the dirt.

Besides the candles, the table was laden with other unseemly goodies. Fruit, which had started to rot, filling the air with a cloying sweet smell I’d originally thought was spillover from the party. A large bowl was brimming with something deep red and swarming with flies. I sniffed the air, and under the potent reek of fruit and all the perfume I’d inhaled upstairs was the unmistakable scent of blood.

The first question, and the one I couldn’t shake, was,
Where did she get all that blood
?

Indeed, the chalk outline on the floor was marked by rust-colored symbols, the same brown as dried blood.

This was some
dark
magic.

Next to the bowl of blood was a framed photo, but I couldn’t make out what it showed. The gold frame glimmered faintly in the guttering light of Santiago’s lighter. I inched closer, but he clamped a hand around my wrist and held me back.

“I wouldn’t.” He crouched low to the dirt floor, taking his lighter with him, and showed me a second chalk-and-blood outline, this one a good two feet from the smaller symbol I’d been looking at.

God only knew what would have happened to me if I’d stepped over it.

“Thanks,” I whispered.

“Mmhmm.” He moved me another half-step back, then stood again, holding the lighter out so I could see the table better.

There, with the candles and rotting offerings, was a squat rectangular lump. Confused by the shape, I squinted, and all at once it dawned on me what I was looking at.

The bloodstained cinder block from the bar alley.

I think I was the only one between the two of us who really understood the gravity of seeing that cinder block among the other odds and ends.

My phone started to buzz again.

I swiped past the notification of missed texts and answered the call without seeing who it was.

Music blared, now coming in stereo between the thump from upstairs and what was coming through the other side of the phone.

“
Where are you
?” Wilder shouted over the din.

My heart leaped. He was okay. He was safe. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been for him until the moment I knew I didn’t need to worry.

“I’m in the basement.”

“There’s a ba—?”

“Don’t say that too loud, Wilder.” Tansy might be anywhere, and the last thing I wanted was to have my joke about being buried in a shallow grave come true.

“Are you okay?” His voice was quieter now, but he was still struggling to be heard over the crowd.

“Yeah, I…” I glanced at Santiago. There was no way this wouldn’t get weird. “I found someone to help us, and I’m safe. Can you get outside from where you are?”

“Sure, but I’m not going anywhere witho—”

“Meet me outside. Just go. I promise you I’ll be fine.” I could
not
promise him this, but I didn’t want to give him any reason to wait for me. If I couldn’t make it out with Santiago by my side, there was no hope for my escape to begin with. “And if you see Tansy, don’t stop. Don’t try to grab her. Don’t even look at her. Run.”

The silence that followed stretched out so long I thought the call might have been disconnected. Instead he jolted me with the surprise of a sudden cough. “What’s happening, Princess? I thought we were here to get her.”

“We were. But the girl who looks like Tansy isn’t Tansy.”

“What do you mean?”

I wanted to yell at him to stop asking questions and listen to what I was saying, but instead I said, “The demon is out, Wilder. Get outside and take as many people with you as you can.”