Forest Moon Rising (52 page)

“
W
E’RE MARCHING INTO HELL. Again,” Tess says.

I feel her wilt beneath my talons.

“I’m tired of killing,” she whispers. Her hands go to her mother’s pearls. She ratchets them around and around her neck. She’s favoring her left arm, the one the Nörglein stabbed.

“Wrong answer, babe,” I reply. “These guys are mean. They’re territorial, and you’ve just taken out their protector and mentor.”

“But the Nörglein was old and rotten to the core, a being from another dimension that didn’t belong here. These are men. Humans, no matter how warped and murderous. They need to go to the law.”

The pearls increase their speed around her neck, then stop suddenly as she stares at them.

I can see ideas forming behind her eyes. She quirks a half smile.

“Not enough, dahling. You can’t be sure this plan will—like—work.”

“I calmed a plane full of panicking passengers on the verge of a riot,” she says. “I kept them from opening the hatch of a pressurized cabin at twenty thousand feet. And I didn’t have the pearls to help.”

“These guys aren’t panicking.”

“No, but they are nervous and vulnerable. Sean’s off-key singing has set their nerves on edge. All I have to do is tip them over the edge to hopelessness and despair. Like the ghosts down below did to me.”

She turns to her crew with bright eyes and a jaunty set to her shoulders.

I really don’t like this plan. I don’t trust it. But I’m tired enough, I hope it works. At best it will give me a few extra moments of rest before transforming again.

“Donovan, follow me in with your famous smile,” I ordered as I fingered the latch on the back door to the Nörglein’s lair.

“And which smile would that be?” he asked, flashing me the one that used to seduce me.

“The one you use to lull a crowd into agreeing with you no matter how outrageous your words.” If that wasn’t seduction, I’d eat Scrap’s boa.

“Oh, that smile.” Donovan showed his teeth. They shone nearly as brightly as Gollum’s flashlight.

We didn’t need to worry about being heard. Sean had ramped up the volume of his drinking song more than a notch. His wavering tenor kept sliding just far enough out of tune that he made my teeth hurt.

I don’t think I could ever be truly happy with a man who couldn’t filk with me. Good thing Gollum had come back. I liked the way he fit his light baritone in a neat harmony with my soprano.

But I had to remember acutely the eighteen months of loneliness while my one true love lived with another woman.

“Gollum, got any more of those zip strips?”

“Of course.” He drew a whole wad of them out of his backpack.

“Boys, stay behind Gollum and help him restrain the bad guys the best you can. Girls, collect weapons and ammo and stash it out of reach. But don’t leave any fingerprints. We want the law to find them in the marijuana patch. We’ll get them on illegal weapons charges as well as drug production.”

I took a deep breath and touched the pearls one more time for luck, and for insight. I needed to channel my mother’s talent and invoke the goddess within.

You have your own talent, dear,
I heard her sultry voice in the back of my mind.

I opened the door and peeked into the candlelit bedroom. A massive four-poster bed sat dead center, with rich green on green damask coverlet, curtains, and canopy. A matching wardrobe stood against the far wall with padded damask insets in the doors. They belonged in a seventeenth century Italian villa.

Very modern wing back chairs in the same upholstery and stark end tables sat in a grouping in the far corner. I’d seen almost identical chairs and tables at Cooper’s. Four bored banditos slumped in the chairs, weapons across their laps; deceptively small guns that could hide inside a jacket or down the leg of baggy pants. The young men supported their heads in their hands, rubbing temples as if to relieve a headache.

A headache caused by Sean. He stood stark naked—and a very nice body he had—at the foot of the bed, singing at the top of his lungs, swilling something dark and thick from a glass mug.

The air reeked of burning marijuana and other herbs.

The Nörglein didn’t need magic to bind a victim with that heady mixture. His magic had grown dim and he didn’t waste it when he had drugs that did the same thing.

I opened my mouth and let the first notes of “Heart’s Path” slide under and around Sean’s bawdy ditty.

He paused and stared at me through bloodshot eyes that didn’t focus or track well.

I raised my voice and poured all of my loneliness and pain into the words. With eyes closed and chin trembling I let all of my pent-up emotions, the sense of betrayal and desertion, the grief, the aching emptiness that had built into a year and a half of depression, bleed through the music.

I opened the ache of all the nights I’d tossed restlessly, reaching out to the emptiness beside me in the bed. I relived the horrible heaviness in my heart as I watched Gollum walk away. I cried all the tears I had bottled up for eighteen months.

I repeated the last two lines with emphasis on “I will die.”

I heard a sniffle behind me. Phonetia dashed tears away with the back of her hand. E.T. cried openly.

The guys in the corner stared at me dumbly, not moving, not raising their weapons.

So I stepped closer, aiming my voice at them and sang the song again. This time I held the pearls, twisting them around and around my neck, as I’d needed to twist the faery ring to activate it.

“Ah, Tessie, ’tis a mournful day the Irish left the Emerald Isle behind,” Sean slurred. He took one step toward me and tumbled onto the bed, snoring.

One of the bad guys looked up, blinking rapidly. “Who . . . who are you?” he asked, swallowing several times.

I felt the lump in his throat and the trembling in his chin.

“I am the avenging angel who is going to end your tyranny over the forest,” I sang, keeping the song, and the agony alive in conversation. I projected as much fear as I had ever felt into the statement.

All four of them fell to their knees, holding their heads. Three of them bent double, sobbing uncontrollably.

Then I sang an Irish lullaby.
Tura lura, lura
. Those three men fell asleep, sniffling and sobbing in their twisted dreams. Still, the one who spoke resisted me.

So I found in my memory the tune of a Scottish dirge, usually played on the bagpipes, and gave him all of the anguish I felt when I’d held my mother in my arms as she died; the last words on her lips, “I love you.”

By the time I breathed before the third phrase, all four men had zip strips on wrists and ankles. The girls stashed the weapons and ammunition in the wardrobe.

Then E.T. shoved tiny toxic berries from her fingertips into their mouths. “Just enough to make them sick,” she said on a grimace. “Not enough poison to really hurt them.”

Four down, eight to go in the outer rooms,
Scrap reminded me.

He turned bright pink as the door crashed to the floor and those eight men flooded in. I heard eight safeties click off as I stared down the muzzles of eight very nasty guns.

D
ONOVAN STEPPED IN FRONT OF ME, putting a solid barrier between the bad guys and the rest of us.

“You don’t really want to do that,” he said calmly.

“Wanna make a bet?” Blondie sneered in reply. Then he spoiled his menacing attitude by scratching his ass. Poison oak had breached his protections. Or was that
breeched?

I caught my giggle in mid-throat, nearly choking.

“The demon tattoos are protecting them from your smile, Donovan,” I whispered.

“Shouldn’t make a difference,” Donovan replied, clearly puzzled, though he kept the smile in place.

In my peripheral vision I saw all five children sidling along the walls, converging on the crowded doorway.

“Tura lura lura,” Sean sang into the damask bed covering, still mostly unconscious in his drunken stupor.

“Huh?” Blondie said.

Donovan backed up a bit, pushing me deeper into the room.

I planted my feet, ready to resist, when I saw Phonetia lighting a smudge pot. The sweet aroma of burning marijuana filled my senses. My vision reeled.

Careful, babe. Breathe short and shallow
.

On the other side of the room, Doug carried another smudge pot. This one reeked of something else.

Blondie raised his weapon.

Scrap flashed bright red and stretched. From one eye blink to the next he changed from cute little imp to lethal weapon.

Even before he finished sharpening, I lashed out from behind Donovan, whacking three weapons out of slack hands.

Phonetia loosed her sharp blackberry arms, grabbing another rifle.

Oak and Cedar launched into a flying tackle that tumbled the entire bunch of startled men into a tangled heap.

I reversed my blade, scraping each demon tat with the tines, drawing blood. They writhed with inner fire of magic foiled. Or was that fouled?

Somehow Scrap managed to emerge from the blade just enough to spit into each of the wounds.

Imp spit.

A powerful antibiotic against a demon tag. Poison to all else.
Borrowed the idea from E.T.

Wild screeches and howls pierced the drug haze swirling around the room.

The demon tats no longer protected them.

Gollum whipped out plastic zip strips. The boys snapped them in place.

And it was over before I had time to breathe.

I didn’t have to kill anyone and I didn’t have to bring down a band of criminals alone.

My Tess sort of wilts. Working magic takes a lot of energy and she just loosed some pretty powerful juju.