covencraft 04 - dry spells (17 page)

“Seth.”

Now that she’d said it, Paris could see it was him: dark shapes were his eyes would be, flashing gold for a moment. His shape wasn’t entirely human in the apparition - part animal, part man.

She’s calling me.

Paris remembered the demon’s words from Jade’s kitchen. She called him. Faced with Sakkara, up against magic which was clearly stronger than her own, Jade had called for Seth. A demon. Something unpleasant twisted in his stomach: a mixture of the horror he felt on her behalf and a petty jealousy he felt for himself, for not being the one she called. He knew it was a foolish feeling; he wouldn’t have heard her if she called for him. Maybe she had. He didn’t know.

The shape of the demon moved closer to the spectral versions of Sakkara and Jade. The revenant of Jade started to fade, but as she did, she reached out and grabbed Seth. Seth moved toward her like he was a metal golem, pulled by magnets into her field and then they both flickered out of existence.

Paris sagged to the ground, unaware the spell had expended so much of his energy until he was no longer feeding it power and it ended. He felt heavy and thick. His brain was sluggish. He felt Lily’s hands come under his arms and she gave him a sharp tug to pull him up.

“Your hand is sinking.”

Paris looked down at his hand, seeing it sunk deep into the cold earth, far deeper than he should have been able to press it in on its own with winter freezing the topsoil. He pulled his hand out slowly, wincing as he did, feeling the last vestiges of the spell loosen from his hand, like a sticky spiderweb being pulled away from his skin. He stood up and wiped his hand off on his pant leg.

“She sent her to the other side. Sakkara.” He still couldn’t force himself to call her his mother. Her name felt foreign and peculiar on his lips; he didn’t often get the chance to use her given name.

“And Jade took Seth with her. I think…” Lily looked away from him again, toward the area where Jade and Seth had disappeared. “I think she knew what she was doing. I get this sense like it wasn’t really a conscious decision on her part, but it wasn’t entirely random either. She was afraid of where she was going. She needed help.”

And called a demon to assist her
, Paris thought. It made sense, he supposed. Who do you bring to a foreign land but a native?

“Can you sense her now? I know before, in the kitchen, you said she was gone, but perhaps out here…” he trailed off, watching her carefully.

Lily pursed her lips and turned slowly in a circle, stretching her hands out. She closed her eyes. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t-” She paused and then titled her head, like she was listening.

“What?”

“Her migraines. We think, she thinks and Dr. Gellar agrees, that they’re caused by our connection. And if I push…”

Paris weighed her words. “Jade agrees with that diagnosis.”

“Agrees? Not really, but she knows it’s true. I could push, but I don’t know if it hurts her.”

Paris turned her words over in his mind, struggling. The urge to know how Jade was warred with the desire not to see her hurt. “You can’t sense her then.”

“I don’t know. Maybe?” Lily amended. “It’s bright. Wherever she is. It’s very bright.”

“Is she hurt? Is the demon still with her? Did they make the journey all right?”

Lily’s eyes, still shut, crinkled at the corner, a look of strain coming across her features. She rolled one of her shoulders, wincing as she did. It was the same shoulder upon which his mother had cast runes on Jade. “She’s scared.” Lily opened her eyes and looked at him. “But it’s not… she doesn’t fear for her life or anything. It’s not like she’s in immediate danger. It’s this constant, low level thrum. Like being on a tight-rope, or standing on the edge of a high diving board. I don’t think she’s hurt.” Lily blinked suddenly, looking away, her eyes glassy and wet.

“Is she in pain?” He hesitated, not sure if how blunt he could be.

Lily shook her head. “No, I just… She feels so far away. She’s always, I mean, I know I was gone for a long time and she was alone, but I wasn’t aware. I’ve never…” Lily cleared her throat. “She’s never been far away from me.”

Since he’d known her, Paris had never been far away from Jade either. It was something they had in common.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jade didn’t know how long she and Seth had been walking. She checked her watch and found it frozen, probably at the time she’d been pushed into the demon dimension. It didn’t seem like the sun had moved in the sky. She wasn’t hot, her feet didn’t hurt, but she definitely had the sense of time passing. What she didn’t know was if she asked Seth how much time had passed, would he answer like a parent in a long car trip, hissing, “We’ll get there when we get there”? Or would he growl that it had only been five minutes?

It didn’t feel like it had been five minutes, but she didn’t have a way of measuring that. She started to count. By the time she got to three hundred, she felt better and worse. Better because now she knew it had been five minutes and worse because that felt a lot longer than she thought five minutes would feel. The landscape hadn’t changed. There was a large, desiccated tree up ahead and the only way Jade marked their progress was by seeing it get closer, closer, and closer still. Then it was behind her and she lost it as a reference point. The ground was hard and dry under her feet. There were large rocks around - boulders, she guessed they were called. She couldn’t call them rocks anymore when they were that big. The whole thing kind of reminded her of pictures she saw in National Geographic of Arizona, or the interior of California.

Or Mars, really. Just wide open space broken up by things of nature.

Was it still nature if it was on this side of the portal? Why were the rules different here? What else did that imply? So many questions kept coming to her brain and she could imagine herself babbling them all out to Seth, like she was a four year old, and him getting fed up with her and deserting her. In the desert. There had to be some kind of special word for that. Getting deserted in the desert. Desertation?

“Possum! I can hear the gears of your brain working.”

She flinched at his tone. “I’m not saying anything!”

Seth exhaled sharply through his nose and out of the corner of her eye, she swore steam or smoke came out of his nostrils as he did, but when she turned her head and faced him dead on, there was nothing there.

Except for his weird ears. And the tail. The tail was super freaky. She tried not to stare, but had the feeling her lack of staring was just as obvious as if she openly gaped.

“I can feel you seeping. It’s aggravating. You’re spilling feelings all over the place.” He said
feelings
like it was an entirely different kind of F-word.

It was probably the first and only time she’d been accused of being too emotive. Normally people found her cold or standoffish. She blinked. “I can’t not think, you know. Like all those meditation bull-shit mantras they say to clear your mind, that’s not actually possible.” She chewed at the soft fleshy part of her inside lip. “I’m staying quiet. I thought you’d want me to stay quiet.”
Especially because I have the feeling I’ll need to hit you up for a lot of information before this whole shebang is over and you’ll get sick of me,
she added silently.

“I would prefer you quiet if you weren’t oozing your emotions all over the place. Mortals.” The last bit was also said like a curse word, the hiss of the
S
trailing out long after the word should have ended.

“I think I’m taking all this rather well. I’ve been banished to the demon dimension, which by the way really should have a better name than ‘demon dimension,’” she said hotly, using her fingers to put air quotes around the word, “and presumably I’m trapped until I meet up with the Gorgon, some kind of creature I have no idea about. And I have to get something from her she probably won’t want to give me.”

“If you’re hoping to curry some pity or favor with me by listing out all your problems and waiting for me to feel sorry for you, keep waiting. I’m a demon, Possum. I don’t care about your little mortal problems.”

“This is hardly a little mortal problem,” Jade retorted, sweeping her hand wide to gesture to all of the desert. “This is the very opposite of a little mortal problem.”

“All of your problems are little mortal problems. Once you’ve been alive for thousands of years, then we’ll talk about problems.” Seth’s jaw flexed as he ground his teeth together, steadfastly keeping his eyes focused ahead of him and not looking at her.

Feeling horrible about something, really horrible - the dejected, kind of hopeless and desperate horrible - was only trumped by someone dismissing it, like it was some kind of annoying gnat, whenthe reality was it was swallowing everything in your life whole, chewing it up and spitting it out. Jade could feel hot tears spring to her eyes. She was tired, she was trapped in the demon world with Seth and she didn’t know how long until she could go home. She hated the fact that she wanted to cry and couldn’t. Not in front of Seth.

It was even worse once Seth glanced over at her. “Are you crying?” He made a disgusted sound. “At the risk of sounding like your parents, I’ll give you something to cry about if you don’t stop.”

“I’m not crying!” she lied, snorting air up her nostrils, trying to keep the snot at bay.

Seth sighed, long and drawn out. Jade fished in her coat pocket for a tissue and finding one completely unused and nicely folded up made her feel better. She meticulously unfolded it, used it and then folded it back up just as carefully. She looked over as she realized Seth was staring at her.

“Is it going to be like this the entire time? Your fragile human emotions dribbling out?”

“Bite me.”

“I’m not even tempted at this point.” He glanced ahead of him and then kind of pointed to the distance with one of his hands. Jade noticed his tail sort of did the same thing - vaguely pointing in the same direction as his hand. “There’s the road we need, up there.”

“That’s good, right?” She squinted but didn’t see what he was pointing at. All she could see were more boulders, more tumbleweeds, sand, and dead trees. And something moving across the landscape with a skittering, lurching motion. She really didn’t want to get closer to that.

“Well, it’s not as bad as being stuck in the middle of the desert.”

She pursed her lips, still staring off into the distance. “It goes somewhere.”

“You’re an optimist. Who knew?”

Maybe it was the fatigue, maybe it was the ridiculousness of her situation, or maybe it was some kind of demon dimension-induced psychosis, but Seth’s dry tone and the expression on his face tipped her over into hysteria. She giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sound. Seth turned and stared at her, incredulousness written all over his face. She almost had the giggles under control, but then his ears did this strange, dog-like twitch thing and it was like watching a puppy perturbed by a new sound.

“It usually takes most people a few thousand years before they go stark raving mad over on this side.”

Laughter bubbled up and she had to stop for a second to bend over and rest her hands on her knees to gather herself. Seth kept walking. Jade took a few deep breaths and then, out of the corner of her eye, saw something moving. She looked over and saw a bright blue rock a couple feet away from her. No blue rock had been there moments before. She stared at it. It was just a rock, right? It was a deep azure, with jagged and sharp edges. But still, definitely only rock-shaped.

“If you don’t keep moving, that
vismutha
will think you’re prime for eating. Their saliva is the progenitor of necrotizing fasciitis.”

As if it heard him, the rock juddered, a bizarre shimmy nothing solid should have been able to manage. Jade didn’t think it was possible for her to jump that far from a stand still, but she made it a good two feet and caught up with Seth in one more stride, falling into step beside him, even as she glanced behind her once more at the blue rock. Because it wasn’t symmetrical, she could tell it had rotated slightly since she’d jumped. Jade could only guess that the pointy bit was its head - it had been directed to her before and was pointing to them now, almost like it watched them leave. Seth glanced cursorily at her and she had an urge to step closer to him.

“It only feeds on things that don’t move. Keep moving and you’re fine.”

She swallowed hard, and reluctantly took her eyes from the blue rock. Despite the fact that Seth was a demon and mostly an asshole, his tone just now had been almost… kind.

“And we do have a better name than the demon dimension,” Seth added. “We call it the Dearth.”

#

“
Do you know how to get her back? From where she is?” Lily asked.

Paris grimly put one foot in front of the other, heading on the pathway back to the car. There was nothing further for them in the forest. They’d seen what happened, seen what his mother had done. Now they had to figure out what to do.

“I don’t know as much magic as Jade,” Lily continued. “I mean, she’s teaching me and I can sort of share the information in her head, but now with her migraines, I don’t want to push. Even if I did, it’s harder when I don’t know what I’m looking for. And I have no idea what I’m looking for.”

“Neither do I,” Paris was forced to admit.

“But you have some thoughts on where to start, right?”

Her tone was so hopeful he didn’t know what to say. He had no idea where to start looking. The only place he could even imagine to begin were Sakkara’s demon grimoires, one of which Jade had somewhere in her cottage.

The other two were in his house. Where, presumably, Sakkara also was. He heard a stumbling sound behind him, followed by a curse, and he turned to see Lily pushing herself up from where she must have tripped. He reached out a hand to help her regain her balance, but then paused, his hand hovering just out of reach. She looked down at his hand and then back up at him, a confused look on her face as she righted herself.