The Witch and the Huntsman (3 page)

“
Portland. It’s about an hour’s drive away. What the hell, Allison, you aren’t seriously thinking of flying up there, are you? On your own dime? Just on a crazy hunch?”

“
Welcome to my wild and crazy world, Detective,” I told him with a smile. But the smile was fake.

The truth was that inside, I was scared shitless. I had an eerie premonition about this trip—and it totally wasn’t that it was going to be my dream vacation. Normally when I psychically look ahead to things, I get a clear vision of myself doing something afterwards, too. You know, some event like next Christmas at my folks or just me returning home again and turning on the coffee machine or opening a bottle of wine. This is called ‘clairvoyance.’

But this time, I couldn’t see anything past the moment I arrived at the Chasse. And no matter what I did, I still couldn’t get the picture of that movie,
The Shining,
out of my head.

Damn you, Stephen King.

Chapter Three

Three hundred and five dollars
a night it was going to cost me to stay there!

And that was for the cheapest rooms they had, the little squished-up ones that overlooked the parking lot! Plus $500 for a round-trip ticket to Portland on Alaska Airlines, the cheapest I could find on such short notice. And speaking of parking lots, I’d have to leave my Camry in short term parking at LAX—and who knew for how long? Smithy was right; throw in a rental car, and this crazy trip to rescue a person I’d never even met before was easily going to cost me two grand!
Holy crap
! My Visa card was going to be underwater for the rest of the year.

“
What was that?” snapped my boss. “I didn’t hear it.”

“
I didn’t say anything.” At least I thought I hadn’t. Not out loud. Maybe I had, though—this was going to be two thousand dollars I couldn’t really afford. Especially if I was losing a whole week of paid work.

“
I don’t think a week’s suspension is unfair in this case,” continued Donna, like a true mind reader, which she claimed to be. Not that that was any tough trick at the moment.

I’d gone in for my punishment at noon, as commanded. Her ‘offices’ consisted of a single loft over a pool hall that was filled with tables and banks of phones. And her desk. All the furniture there looked like it had been inherited from a bookie’s office, which it probably was.

“
It could have been
two
weeks, you know. Or we could have just fired you. You’ve been blowing off the thirty-minute rule a lot lately.”

The ‘thirty-minute rule’ is how long we’re supposed to keep the client engaged in chatting on hotlines. The first twenty minutes’ profit all goes to Donna; after that, our commission kicks in. After thirty minutes, a client will begin to relax and pour out all her personal details—and in our business, it’s almost always a “her” — so reaching that golden $150 hour, when you’ve established a relationship and the big money call backs are in the cards, gets easier and easier from there.

“
Look, Allison,” Donna went on, her voice softening just like I was one of her palmistry marks back in the day, “you’re one of my best readers, and I personally don’t want to lose you. We feel you’ve got really great potential. But you need to pay more attention to the micro-economics of the industry. Take this week to brush up on your Cheshires and get your act together, okay?”

Cheshires are these flexible scripts we read from where we’re supposed to get personal info and do ‘high-dollar’ readings. Why they’re called Cheshires, I have absolutely no idea. And Donna’s not the worst in the business by a long shot—she’s like Honest Abe compared to some of the other outfits I’ve worked for. At least she doesn’t use ‘fishing and baiting’ techniques to illegally obtain credit card info or do ‘curse removals’ for an extra fee.

Beware any psychic who tells you there is a curse on you, by the way; those are always phony. Unless, of course, it’s me saying it...

Since I really am a psychic, I mean. For instance, right now I could read Donna’s bullshit like a book. For all her talk about how great I was, she just plain didn’t like me.

I fumed about our conversation on the plane all the way to Portland. I kept coming up with petty little ideas for revenge. I mean, I was a
witch
, for crying out loud! I should be able to hex her pretty good in revenge for that week I’d been suspended—nothing terrible or tragic, you understand, but just a sort of subconscious reminder that it’s not nice to mess with Mother Gaia. I’d read about a magic spell called the “Curse of a Hundred Small Things” in one of my Wicca books, so I started daydreaming about all the nasty little booboos I could bring down on that bitch right now, like paper cuts, runs in her stocking, coffee spills in her lap, maybe a bright blue screen on her computer...

Suddenly I heard the faintest of whispers: “
Beware of what you wish for, child...
”

“
Millicent
!” My innermost thoughts replied to her, not my vocal cords. “You’re back! Wow, am I ever glad to hear your voice! So much has been happening—and I really need your help.”

By now, I was so used to having my dead friend’s voice in my head that it was like having a part of myself restored to me again. But her words, when they came, were still as quiet and distant as a wind from the far side of the moon. A place Sam Moon knew well. Long story, and one I’m still not one hundred percent sure I believed.

“
When you open yourself up to magic, Allison, it is not just the light that comes in. The dark is waiting, too...”

Hey, the dark can feel pretty damn good sometimes
, I thought.

“
Allison! The dark side can corrupt you, can make you do its bidding. You’ve glimpsed the demon that Samantha wrestles with daily—you’ve seen the evil that can possess and destroy those you care about.”

Yeah, okay, I guess I had. And a little too intimately, sometimes, like when I’d witnessed the Englishman Billy and his daughter being taken over by the creature from hell that had haunted their house. I suppressed an involuntary shudder.

“
It can begin so innocently, just by being selfish and using your gifts to punish those who would help you.”

“
Huh? You mean,
Donna
? She’s helping me by laying me off for a week?” I snorted. This time I really did do it aloud, and the noise startled the guy in the seat next to me, even though he was wearing headphones.

“
Yes, she is, dear. What you did to those girls at the slumber party was wrong, and you know it. They were little more than children. With magical powers such as yours comes great responsibility. A witch who becomes corrupted by evil can become greater and more powerful than any demon.”

“
Wait—you know about that? I thought you were still keeping radio silence then.”

“
You forget I can always read your mind. But Allison, that isn’t why I’m reaching out to you now—I need to warn you. This...this...journey you are undertaking...” but her voice was weakening again. It really was like trying to tune in my dad’s old transistor radio in the garage.

“
...you must not...there is great danger, Alli...so much darkness ahead...”

But then the captain’s voice came over the loudspeakers in the cabin and drowned out Millicent’s words inside my head. Great. His totally useless warning had kicked Millicent out of my head completely. At least, for now.

Portland International Airport smelled like mildew and was filled with surprisingly dark and malign vibrations, like it was built on a Native American burial ground or something. Maybe I should go freelance, I thought. Maybe I could get hired to turn Oregon ghost-free...

Instead, I took the Dollar bus to my Kia rental car and drove up the Mt. Hood Highway, through the little town of Sandy to the even littler town of Government Camp in the gathering gloom. I couldn’t raise Millicent again, no matter how hard I tried. She was already right about one thing, though; there was much darkness ahead. It was almost pitch-black by the time I got to La Chasse Lodge. Only the snow glowed faintly gray all around me as I followed the little two-lane Snowline Highway that snaked steeply up the mountain. The road surface was covered with a slick sugary sprinkling that reflected my headlights, even though it was midsummer.

I’m not in Los Angeles anymore...

Anyway, I was the only driver on the road for those last few miles before the highway ended and became a two-lane road that led to the Lodge. In fact, I might have been all alone in the world.

That illusion lasted for about two more minutes. Then I crested a long curve and saw lights and a sign directing me to turn right onto a long one-way La Chasse access drive, which was lined with parked cars, some half-buried in snow. Outdoor lights glowed everywhere like snow lanterns, and the historic main lodge, looking nothing like its movie self, was dazzlingly lit up like a Christmas tree surrounded by boxy brick service buildings masquerading as presents. Right now, my worst problem wasn’t fighting off any evil emanating from them—it was finding a place to park.

To make matters worse, I was sideswiped into a snowbank by a delivery van pulling out of one of the brick boxes. It had ‘
Jaeger Specialty Game Meats and More...
’ painted on its side panels.

The little Kia’s all-weather radials spun and whined, but finally I skidded out of the snowbank and drove around to the main lot, which was about the size of a football field and had plenty of spaces free. But from there, I had a long, freezing walk I totally wasn’t dressed for, hauling my suitcase across the parking lot where a famous Hollywood director once had his head chopped off by a helicopter, according to Google.

If I’d been my vampire friend Samantha Moon, I could have stopped and maybe had a chat with the director’s ghost, because Sam sees spirits everywhere. I can see Millicent, even feel her physically sometimes—and there was the embarrassing fact that I’d hung with her son Peter several times without even realizing he was a ghost and not a real living person. And, okay, I’d seen demons, too—but so far, no other dead souls.

Of course, if I were Sam, I wouldn’t have been shivering with the cold, either, because she’s always cold, as I can testify. However, at that moment I wouldn’t have minded if some otherworldly figure—a ghostie or even Bigfoot himself—had popped up out of the surrounding fir trees to warn me what I was about to find inside.

They’d given away my room.

Chapter Four

“
I’m very sorry, ma’am,” said the European girl at the front desk when I tried to check in—and,
grrrrr
, how I
hate
being ma’amed. “But it is after six o’clock, and as you can see, we’re very full.”

By ‘full,’ I guess she meant crowded, which seemed to be true; there were aristocratic-looking people in ski sweaters crowded as thick as termites even inside the main lobby, which was built of thick stone and huge redwood beams and featured a massive six-sided fireplace in the middle.

“
We do have one more room I could let you have,” she said, tapping on the laptop that looked totally out of place on the tacky liquor-store casing and mismatched wood panels of the front desk. I guess you had to be really, really rich to afford rustic authenticity like this. I wasn’t really, really rich. I wasn’t even a little bit rich. I was now borderline broke.

“
How much?”

“
Only $690,” she said. With a straight face. I guess that comes easier when you’re Ukrainian or Romanian or whatever.

“
What
?
” I’d max my sole remaining credit card if I stayed even two nights here at those prices. “Seriously?”

“
It’s a fireplace room with all-original art, ma’am.”

I said no thanks and dragged my suitcase away. Great. Now I would have to drive all the way back to Sandy in the dark and hope the Best Western there still had a vacancy. But the point wasn’t to be a guest at this weird-ass little
Duck Dynasty
snob resort—it was to find out what had happened to Marisa somewhere out there in the cold, white pine forest. I didn’t need to actually stay here to do that. But it might help.

So I went back to the desk clerk with my tail between my legs.

“
Yes?” No more ma’aming now.

“
Actually, I kinda sorta forgot to mention it, but a friend of mine is staying here, and she said I could maybe bunk in with her. Her name’s Marisa?”

Blank stare. “Marisa...”

Damn. Had I ever known her last name? “Marisa, uh, Smith. But sometimes she uses her maiden name, I forget what that is.”

With icy reluctance, the Slavic ice-queen tapped the keyboard with her perfect blue nails. “No Marisa,” she said.

“
Did she check out?”

The girl wasn’t even bothering to be polite now. She heaved a loud sigh and rolled her eyes, but at least she did me the ginormous favor of glancing back at her laptop screen. “No, we have no listing of anyone here for that name in the last month. Sorry.”

So I’d just come all this way on a wild goose chase for the sake of nothing but a feeling in my gut.
Girl, I am really worried about you
, I told myself.
This witch thing is making you seriously lose it
.

“
No, Allison, you couldn’t be more wrong,” came Millicent’s soft whisper in my thoughts again. “You are always right to follow your feelings, wherever they may lead you. But now they’ve brought you into great danger. There’s a terrible evil in this place, and you must be on your guard night and day.”

I went and stood over by the rustic gift shop door. “What kind of evil, exactly?” I intoned silently.

“
Some things must remain veiled and cannot be spoken aloud, dear,” Millicent replied almost fearfully. I was always forgetting the rules that governed psychic communication between this world and the next. Like full disclosure of names that couldn’t be named.