Evil Ways (16 page)

"All right, okay, never mind," she said, and turned toward the door. "As long as you weren't being
gallant."

"Fuck, no."

The room across from Annie's bedroom was apparently used for storage, and it looked like there was ten years' worth of junk in there. Since Fenton wasn't present, Colleen used her witch sense to scan the room, searching for anything that might hint of black magic. Nothing. She did the same with the bathroom.
Nada.

She met Fenton in the hall, just as he was leaving the bedroom. She looked a question at him, and he shook his head. "Not a damn thing, except that old Annie had an interesting vibrator collection, and some real odd tastes in porn."

"Do I want to know what those were?"

"Nah, keep your innocence for as long as you can." He made as if to step past her. "Excuse me."

"Where are you going?"

"Bathroom."

"But I just checked it. It's clean."

"I believe you. But, after breathing the air in that room for the last ten minutes, I need to wash my face."

Minutes later, as Fenton followed Colleen back down the stairs, he said, "Well, shit. I was hoping for some kind of a fucking lead, 'cause we sure could use one. But I guess it's okay to call in the locals, before they piss themselves with impatience."

He was almost to the door when Colleen said, "Wait."

Fenton stopped and turned back. "What?"

Colleen shook her. head uncertainly. "I don't know, exactly. But there's
something."

"That nose of yours again, huh?"

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just psychic."

"Okay, we've still got a couple of minutes left. Go wild."

Colleen began to walk the unpolished wooden floor slowly. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but she did know one thing: if

Annie Levesque was a practitioner of the black arts, then she would have a special room in which to do her devil's work. It clearly wasn't upstairs, and you could see all of the main room here, just by turning in a circle.

Carefully, so as not to draw Fenton's attention, Colleen let her witch sense come to the fore. Almost immediately, she stopped and stared down at the wood beneath her feet. Then she dropped to one knee and began running her fingers over the floor's surface, as if feeling for something she had lost there. Then her fingers stopped. There it was: the barely visible line of a trap door leading into some kind of cellar.

Fenton, his back to her, was flipping through some magazines that had been left lying around, shaking each to see if anything would drop out. Colleen called her witch sense back, then, still on one knee, called, "Mulder? I've found something."

Fenton dropped the magazine and came over. "What'd you call me? Mulder?"

"Sorry," she said with a little smile. "I've wanted to say that, just once, ever since I joined the Bureau."

"Uh-huh, sure. Okay, Scully. What you got?"

Colleen had a heavy-duty folding knife in her shoulder bag, intended for use as a tool, not a weapon. It was as a tool that she employed it now, sliding the blade down into the thin crack in the floor. "I've got
this,
Special Agent, and I bet it leads to her workroom." Using the blade as a lever, she pried the trap door up a couple of inches, until she could get her fingers around the edge. Then she threw the hinged wooden door back all the way, sending it crashing onto the floor. The black square it revealed did not appear welcoming. Indeed, to Colleen it smelled like the deepest pit of hell.

"Okay, you might as well call in the Dudleys," she said to Fenton. "They can start on the rest of the place, but this baby down here
— this is all ours."

The Shady Tree Motel, the only place where Morris and Libby had been able to find accommodation, was located a little way outside of Kent, on a bare patch of grass and asphalt surrounded on three sides by low hills and the trees that grew on them. Judging by the number
of cars parked in front of the units when the two returned, business at the Shady Tree was not exactly booming.

They had requested adjoining rooms, with a connecting door between them. Management was happy to oblige but, as epitomized by desk clerk/owner Ted Landry, was a little puzzled. Couples checking into the Shady Tree didn't usually bother with the charade of separate rooms. Not in this day and age
—unless they were going to host one of those swingers' parties, something that had happened a couple of times before. Ted hoped that was the case again. He had managed an impromptu invitation to the last one, and had happy, erotic memories of what followed.

Libby Chastain and Quincey Morris, who were neither lovers nor swingers, could have shared a single room if accommodations were tight, and had done so on a few occasions in the past. They were comfortable with each other, and had a clear sense of their mutual boundaries. But, given the choice, they preferred the space and privacy of separate rooms.

Still, they enjoyed each other's company, most of the time. After leaving Tristan Hardwick's neighborhood, they had grabbed a quick dinner at a Friendly's restaurant before returning to the motel. Although Libby had the corner room, she had ended up next door in Morris's, leaving the connecting door open. Libby, shoes off, now lay on one side of the double bed, with Morris seated on the other, his back against the headboard. The room lights were off, the only illumination coming from the TV screen. The two of them gave little attention to the dumb horror movie that was playing, as they puzzled over the unusually strong black magic that Libby had detected coming from Hardwick's house.

"I don't get it," Morris said. "I spoke on the phone yesterday with a couple of people who know, or at least know about, this Hardwick fella. They both told me, independently, that he's a middleweight, at best. And one of them said that she was pretty sure Hardwick had been brought into the game by what's his name, Godfrey, in Cleveland."

"Morgan Godfrey," Libby murmured. "Now, there's a name to conjure with, you should pardon the expression."

"Yeah, I hear you. But it sure wasn't him you were sensing at Hardwick's place. That bastard's been dead for, let me think, three years, now."

"I'm not supposed to wish him damned and in hell, that's too much like a curse. So let's just say that I hope he didn't see heaven."

"That's a pretty safe bet," Morris said. "All right, so we're left with two possibilities
—not counting the notion that your witch sense was somehow off, which I'm not inclined to consider very seriously."

"Nor I," Libby said. "It's never let me down before."

"So, either the intel we got on Hardwick was out of date, or just plain wrong…"

"Or Mister Hardwick was entertaining a visitor. Not the late Morgan Godfrey, but somebody at least as powerful, if not even more so."

"Somebody you couldn't handle, if push comes to shove?"

Libby gnawed her lower lip for a few moments before saying, "I don't know, Quincey. It's impossible to say. I guess it's like two gunfighters facing off in the Old West
—they don't find out for certain who's the fastest, until one of them is lying dead in the street."

"I reckon I've got an ancestor or two who would've understood that metaphor pretty well," Morris said. "Maybe we'd be wise to avoid that particular showdown, if we can."

"Excellent idea, Tex. I haven't got anything to prove. But, we've still got a job to do."

"I know. Well, if our second scenario is the right one, and Hardwick had himself a visitor tonight, maybe whoever it was will be gone by tomorrow."

"Yes, the Goddess willing. So, you're thinking we cruise Hardwick's street again tomorrow, and see what kind of vibes I pick up."

"Yup. Then, depending on what you find, we decide whether we're going to move on Hardwick. And if we do, how."

Libby nodded, a trifle sleepily. "As plans go, there's this to say for it: I haven't got a better one."

The conversation eventually drifted into companionable silence. After a while, Libby dozed off. Morris saw that the horror movie on TV was over, and coming up next was
Once Upon a Time in the West,
one of his favorites. He decided he might as well just let Libby stay where she was, for now.

The room was quiet then, apart from the muted sounds of gunplay, macho dialogue, and the film's twangy soundtrack. A couple of hours
later, Charles Bronson was just about to face off against Henry Fonda in the film's final showdown when Morris said,
"Libby."

There was something in those two syllables that caused Libby Chastain's eyes to snap wide open. In a voice that did not sound sleepy at all, she asked, "What? What is it?"

"Do you hear something?"

Roderico Baca stood on one of the hills overlooking the Shady Tree Motel and prepared to release hell
—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. He had arrived a bit later than planned, having spent too much time enjoying himself with the late Tristan Hardwick. Thinking about that, he smiled to himself, wondering what the stupid police would make of what he had left behind.

But despite the delay, plenty of time remained for Baca to do his work. He knew that Chastain was down there
—he could smell the bitch. He would assume, for now, that the man was with her. The two might even be fucking, right this minute. If so, they were about to gain a whole new understanding of
coitus interruptus.

Baca had spent almost an hour in preparation, once he had set upon the method by which he would destroy Chastain and her companion. Several others might well join them, constituting what the U.S. military calls "collateral damage." Baca was not bothered in the slightest by this prospect.

He had chosen the spell he was using with great care. Pardee had said he wanted Chastain's death to be nasty.

"Nasty" was one of the things that Roderico Baca did best.

He had drawn the necessary symbols in the earth, using a silver dagger he had made with his own hands. Then he mixed four of the
key ingredients in proper proportion, all without the use of any kind of light. Baca had acquired the ability to see in the dark. That was appropriate, since, in a sense, it was where he lived.

Once the dry ingredients were mixed, to the accompaniment of the proper incantation, Baca was ready to add the final component. He reached into his leather bag and produced a small glass vial of baby's blood. The ancient spell specified that this ingredient be fresh
—blood that is not refrigerated tends to congeal into an unworkable sludge very quickly.

Baca had made one stop on the way here from Hardwick's place. He knew the ingredient was fresh.

Although it is theoretically possible to perform black magic at any time, Baca much preferred the night for his work. Quite apart from the symbolism (and in magic of any kind, symbolism counts for much), it was known that the Dark Powers were stronger and more active after the light had fled. The darkness was also beneficial for a more pragmatic reason: some of the creatures that a black magician will call to do his bidding only come out at night.

Bats, for instance.

Despite their association with vampires in popular culture (which was a laugh, because, as Baca knew, vampires had no power to take the form of these creatures), bats are generally harmless to humans, the exception being the rabies virus that they sometimes carry. But rabies takes weeks to incubate before it kills, although its victims' final hours are very painful, indeed.

Disease aside, bats constitute no threat to people. They are generally small creatures, and most species eat nothing but insects or fruit. Even the fabled vampire bat, native to South America, will take less than a fluid ounce of blood from its host, whether animal or human.

But just because bats were harmless by nature didn't mean that they had to remain so.

Baca first sent out his power to call the bats to him, and from the skies for miles around, they came, by the thousands. Soon, they were flapping in the air above Baca in a great, circling cloud. He had them flying high above, lest the squeaking they use to navigate be heard on the ground and give warning of what was to come.

The Summoning was done. That was the easy part of the spell. Now for the Transformation. Baca spread his arms wide apart, summoning the power of the Dark Master he served, directing that power into the great mass of bats above him, causing the creatures to
transform.

To
grow
—the bats began to double in size—some of them, to triple.

To
change
—even the largest of the bats had fangs less than a half-inch long. But no more. Under the command of Baca's magic, the bats' teeth grew, until they looked like parodies of Halloween decorations. The teeth were long now, and they were pointed, and they were very sharp.

Then, to
become savage
—bats have little capacity for emotion, but Baca's spell increased that capacity, then filled it with rage and the need to destroy. Any moment now, they would start fighting among themselves. But Baca had better quarry in mind.

Finally, he said a word of power five times and pointed at the motel room where Chastain and her boyfriend were staying. The bats could not see him point, of course; Baca's purpose was to focus the bats' energy and fury on one place.

And so he did.

Thousands of the devil bats dived, almost as one. Their goal was the building down below. Their need was to use their new, razorsharp fangs to kill the warm-blooded creatures inside.

They descended on the Shady Tree Motel like a great, black tidal wave of death.

Small, powerful flashlights are standard equipment for FBI agents operating out in the field; Colleen and Fenton got good use from theirs as they made their way down a rickety ladder and into the underground chamber that had been Annie Levesque's workroom.

It smelled like old death down there.

The room appeared to be about half as large as the main floor above, which made it about thirty feet by twenty. Several wooden tables, both large and small, were placed about, and something that might have been an altar occupied most of one wall. Fenton noticed that there were thick, partly burned candles all over. Although not a smoker, he usually carried a small plastic lighter for emergencies.

Approaching the nearest candle, he flicked the lighter into life, its small flame adding little to the illumination provided by the flashlights.

"Don't do that."
It was the first that Colleen had spoken since they'd arrived, and the small space seemed to magnify both her voice and its urgency.

"How come?" Fenton let the lighter go out. "It's not like we couldn't use some extra light in this shithole."

"No
—this is
her
place, her special place, and you never can tell what… look, just don't light any of her candles, okay? I've got a bad feeling about it."

"Okay." Fenton put the lighter away. He had learned to trust Colleen's "feelings." He might make jokes about her being a half-ass psychic, but her intuition had saved their lives twice, in the eight months they'd been partners. Fenton wasn't so dumb as to reject out of hand things he couldn't explain
—especially after some of the stuff he'd seen in the last year or so.

For Colleen, the room was pretty much what she would have expected. It was neater than Annie's living space upstairs; but then, what Annie had been doing down here probably mattered to her a lot more than watching TV or masturbating to kinky porn. The sheetrock walls were covered with cabalistic symbols, drawn in some kind of brown substance. Colleen didn't think it was anything made by Sherman-Williams or Glidden; she knew what color blood becomes when it dries. That, like everything else she could see, was pretty standard for practice of the black arts. Then her flashlight beam shone on one of the tables, and Colleen saw something that drew her closer. She played the light over the table's rough surface.

Fenton put down the book he'd been examining and came over. "Something?"

"You recognize the symbol." It wasn't a question.

"Sure, a pentagram. These occultists always have one, or several. Are you surprised?"

"Not by the thing itself, but the construction is interesting," Colleen said. "It's actually been carved into the table, rather than drawn on the surface, the way they usually do."

"Okay, sure, and that's important because…"

"In black magic, pentagrams like that are
used
for something, not just as decorations. So they have to be constructed very carefully. The length of the sides, the angles, auxiliary symbols, and so on, have to be exact. Get it wrong, and the results could be… unfortunate."

"Or so these people believe."

"Yes, of course, that's what I meant. So, if you carve the pentagram into wood, assuming you do it properly, you don't have to reinvent the wheel
—or the star, in this case—every time you want to do a working."

Fenton looked at her oddly, although he was in shadow and Colleen couldn't see him. "All right," he said, "so this proves that Annie was punctilious, or obsessive, or paranoid, or maybe all three. Like I said before, are you surprised?"

"In a way. This technique is uncommon. In fact, I've only seen it once before. There was a woman in Massachusetts, Salem in fact, who had one of these carved in her workroom. This was last year, before you and I started working together. Abernathy, her name was. Christine Abernathy."

"Yeah, I remember hearing about that case from somebody at Quantico. Didn't they find her dead, in that 'workroom' you were talking about? There was something weird about her death, but I forget what."

"Weird
is a good word for it," Colleen told him. "The M.E. determined that she'd died of a massive infusion of snake venom. Made sense, since there were fang marks all over her."

"Nasty way to go."

"Yeah, but here's the weird part: no snakes were ever found on the premises, or any kind of cage where they might have been kept. And most of the venom that killed her wasn't from any of the poisonous snakes native to North America. She had
cobra venom
in her, Dale. Not to mention several other kinds that were never identified."

Fenton sent his flashlight beam to join Colleen's, which was focused on the pentagram. "So you think these two dead ladies are connected."

"That's what I'm starting to believe. The fact that both were black witches, okay, that could be coincidence. But carving a pentagram like this is an unusual technique. It suggests
—no, make that
strongly suggests
—that they were trained by the same person."

"I think I've caught up with you, finally, "Fenton said. "If they were trained by the same person
then…"

"It means they could both have been working for the same person
now."

"Fuck," Fenton said softly.

"Yeah," Colleen said.
"Fuck."

It was Sergio Leone who saved them.

If the Spaghetti Westerns he had made back in the 1960s weren't so damn good, Morris would have shooed Libby back to her own room hours earlier, and then gone to bed himself. The two of them would almost certainly have been sound asleep right this minute.

As it was, they were both wide awake, listening intently
—to
something.
Eyes narrowed, Libby said, "It sounds almost like a big flock of—"

Then the world ended.

Or so it seemed, at first, when that great squeaking, flapping wave of devil bats hit the outside of the Shady Tree Motel. Baca had directed a good portion of them to attack the corner room, since that's where his witch sense detected Libby's scent. Morris, by the greatest good luck, happened to be looking through the connecting door toward Libby's room when both of her windows exploded under the assault of thousands of Baca's creations.

Quick reactions ran in Morris's family, and he was off the bed in an instant. With a kick that would have made his old sensei proud, he slammed the connecting door shut before the devil bats in Libby's room could come streaming through into his own.

Except for two of them.

The two monstrous creatures flew madly around the room for a few seconds, making high-pitched squeaking sounds. Then one launched itself right at Morris's face.

He was able to get a forearm up in time to save his eyes, and so the bat contented itself, for the moment, with savaging his arm with its unnaturally sharp fangs.

He tried to wrench it free, but the thing's claws were dug deeply into his arm, and Morris realized he could only rip the bat clear at the expense of his own flesh. Behind him, he could hear Libby screaming and he knew he had to do something
right now.
After a brief mental
flash of the legendary British rocker Ozzy Osbourne, Morris did the only thing he could think of.

He brought his arm up to his face, and with one desperate snap of his teeth bit the damn thing's head off.

The bat's claws tightened around Morris' arm for a second, then released as the creature fell to the floor, blood spurting from the stump where its head had been. Morris spat the head out, trying not to vomit, and turned to see Libby crouched in a corner, screaming and swatting madly at the other bat, which was fluttering around her head, trying to get at her neck and face.