Mark of the Witch (16 page)

Heaving a heavy sigh, I said, “I need to stop thinking about
this for a while.” I took my journal from her and closed the cover.

She smiled and jumped to her feet, not even seeming regretful
at the change of subject, and I felt an immense surge of relief and gratitude
for that. “I have just the thing to perk you up. How about we take a gorgeous,
refreshing walk to the lake?”

My head came up. “That sounds really good right now.”

“Oh, it will be. Better put your journal away first. Tomas
wouldn’t snoop, but that Father Dom—”

“Is a total asshole.”

She laughed softly. “Bring your phone. You’re going to want to
take pictures of this.”

“Okay.” I clutched the journal close, and jogged back inside
and up the stairs to tuck it away beneath my mattress. Then I rejoined Rayne,
who was by then in the kitchen sticking a note to the fridge with a hawk-shaped
magnet. The note told the others where we’d gone, in case they returned before
we did. She had filled two water bottles, which were now dangling from her
shoulder on long straps. “Ready?”

“Is it far?” I asked with a nod at the water as I took one
bottle from her.

“The direct route isn’t. But there’s a more meandering path
through the woods with a waterfall on the way. You’ll love it. We’ll bask in the
sunshine and what’s left of the autumn leaves, and have nature all around us.
Not a word about demons or amulets the entire trip, I promise. Perfect,
right?”

“If I had a smoke it would be,” I said.

I almost jumped up and down at the look that crossed Rayne’s
face then. Her brows went up high, then she quickly lowered them again, avoiding
my eyes.

“Rayne?” I said in a slightly menacing tone.

She sighed. “Oh, all right. I suppose you’ve earned it.” She
pulled a stool away from the breakfast bar and climbed up to reach on top of the
kitchen cabinets, coming down with a pack of cigarettes—menthol, too. She took
one out and tossed it at me.

I caught it, feeling better by the minute, and rummaged in the
drawers until I found a lighter. “You do know your brother well.”

“That I do. He keeps telling me he’s quit. But he always has a
stash.” She replaced the pack, got down and put the stool back where it
belonged. And then we headed out for a leisurely, blissful morning hike.

At least, that was what we intended it to be.

11

T
omas stood outside Marty Swenson’s room at
Tompkins County Mental Health, looking at the nineteen-year-old through the
slightly open door. His stomach knotted with pity for the poor kid. He looked
haggard, obviously laboring under the influence of whatever anti-psychotics had
been pumped into him. His eyes were circled in more rings than Saturn, puffy,
and so blue they looked bruised. The whites were bloodshot and dry. He was in
restraints, though he didn’t seem to notice. He just lay there, very still,
staring at the ceiling, no expression in his lifeless gray eyes.

“You can talk to him,
Padres.
Just
try not to upset him.”

That was the officer stationed at the door. Father Dom had
decided they should show off their collars rather than hide them on this
particular visit. He’d given the police officer some line about the church’s
unofficial inquiry into the bombing, and his explanation had seemed to make
perfect sense to the cop.

“Don’t be in there too long,” the cop added. “And quit if he
gets agitated. His doctors don’t want him upset. I’m enforcing their rules as
much as anything else here. So I’m going for a coffee. You have until I get
back. That sound good to you?”

“Of course,” Father Dom said.

It occurred to Tomas that though he agreed with the officer,
Father Dom would do whatever it took to get the information he wanted and
wouldn’t care if he upset the patient or not.

He’s not always a very nice person, is he?
Why haven’t I ever seen that before?

He’s just focused on the mission, that’s
all,
he told himself.

But since when does the Bible teach that
the end justifies the means?

Father Dom opened the door farther, and the two of them stepped
inside, letting it close behind them.

“Hello, Marty. I’m Father Dominick, and this is Father Tomas. I
hope it’s all right if we talk with you for a few minutes.”

The kid’s eyes didn’t move. He just maintained that unblinking
focus on the ceiling so steadily that Tomas was surprised when he answered. “I
don’t care.” He hadn’t thought the kid had even heard Father Dom’s question.

There were no chairs in the room. Nowhere to sit down, not even
a table or a window ledge. Tomas stood awkwardly, watching the young man,
content to let Dom do all the talking.

“I know that you aren’t the one responsible for what
happened.”

The compassion in Dom’s tone actually surprised Tomas into
looking at him.

It apparently got to the patient, too. He blinked. It was the
first time his eyes had moved at all.

“I know that someone else—something else—somehow got inside
your mind and made you do what you did.”

Another blink. “How do you know?”

“I just do. It’s true, isn’t it?”

Slowly, the young man in the bed nodded.

“Do you remember any of it? Buying the chemicals? Building the
bomb? Taking it to the university? To the Statler?”

The boy’s breath escaped in a slow stuttering sigh. “No. I
didn’t even know there were ministers and priests there.”

“Can you tell me what you do remember?”

Tears welled in Marty’s eyes. They coated the dull gray, making
it shine like wet concrete. “I fell asleep in the hospital. I woke up standing
in the middle of a dust cloud, staring at a pile of rubble.”

Dom’s eyes shot to Tomas’s, then darted back to the boy. “What
about before that, Marty? What kinds of things were happening to you that landed
you in the hospital to begin with?”

Marty closed his eyes slowly. “I can’t…”

“We might be able to help you, if you’ll tell us.”

“We?” Finally his eyes shifted away from the ceiling, and when
he saw Tomas, his expression made it clear that despite Dom’s introductions,
he’d just realized that the old priest was not alone. Then he focused solely on
Tomas, and something changed. His eyes widened, and dark clouds seemed to gather
in their gray depths, darkening them. “You,” he whispered.

Tomas felt a cold chill go through him, and then realized it
wasn’t coming from inside but from without. His breath formed a cloud in front
of his face.

“Where is she?” Again a whisper.

Tomas’s throat was dry as he replied, “Where is who?” But he
already knew.

“Bring me the witch! She is mine!” The kid’s voice had broken,
then deepened, emerged strong and bestial, with a growling undertone. “Bring her
to me, or I will destroy you and all you love!” Marty tugged against the
restraints, managing to sit up in the bed, trying to reach for Tomas. “Bring her
to me, dammit. Bring me the witch!”

Tomas gripped Dom’s arm and backed toward the door, but before
he made it there, the kid suddenly relaxed and smiled very slowly. His look was
pure evil. And then the deep growl subsided to a low whisper once more. “Never
mind. She’s coming to me. I see her now.” Then Marty collapsed on the bed, eyes
rolling back into his head for a moment before he went limp and unconscious.

Tomas looked at Dom. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we’d better get to your demon-serving witches before
he does,” he said.

* * *

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Rayne had to shout over the
roar of the water.

I nodded in emphatic agreement with her statement of the
obvious. The waterfall was narrow, pouring down from about thirty feet above
where the two of us stood and plunging into a small pool at our feet, a brief,
frothy pit stop on the way to the lake another hundred feet below, cutting
deeply into the sheer stone face on the way down. As the water roared down from
above us, it hid a rift in the face of the rocky mountainside, a rift that
widened as it reached ground level where we stood, a deep darkness cloaked
behind the waterfall.

I stood watching the water for long moments, basking in the
natural beauty, letting serenity wash over my body and soul. The mist that
dampened my face felt good, cool and bracing in the sixty-degree temperature of
an autumn afternoon. It was warm for this late in the season.

Rainbow prisms appeared and blinked out again as droplets arced
in the sunlight. Beautiful stones—some glittering like quartz, others striking
in their pink and deep gray striations, some with fossils on their faces—lay at
the bottom of the pool, visible wherever the water wasn’t too foamy to see. And
where the fall hit the surface, the riotous bubbling froth was almost
hypnotic.

And yet my eyes kept darting to the darkness behind the
waterfall. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t seem to keep my focus from that
place.

“It’s a cave,” Rayne said, stating the obvious again.

“Have you ever gone inside?”

She didn’t answer, but when I looked at her, she was staring at
the cave and shaking her head slowly.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She dragged her eyes from the darkness behind
the waterfall, met mine and tried to pull off a sarcastic grin. “Maybe ’cause
I’m not six?”

“That’s not it, and you know it,” I told her, and watched her
fake grin die a slow death. “There’s…something.... You feel it, too, don’t
you?”

She shrugged and looked away from me. But I knew she felt it.
She was a witch, how could she not? There was something back there.
Something…conscious, maybe? I felt eyes watching me, watching us both, from
somewhere in that darkness. And I felt whatever it was calling me…pulling at me
with some unseen force.

“I want to go inside.”

“No, you don’t, Indy,” Rayne said quickly. “Look, okay, I
admit, I feel something, too, but whatever it is, it isn’t good. It
feels…icky.”

She tugged my shirtsleeve when I kept staring at it. “Come on,
there’s a great vantage point right over here. You can smoke your cigarette and
enjoy the view.”

She knew how to distract me. I’d forgotten about the treat in
my pocket because I’d been so entranced by our walk. The woods were wet, the
path we took, slick with mud from the recent rainstorm. And I thought the falls
were probably running at a higher intensity than usual, too.

I followed her to a big flat rock. She perched on it, so I
climbed up after her, took a comfortable position and lit my cigarette. Inhaled,
exhaled, closed my eyes. Damn, that was good.

“The view from here is the best I’ve ever seen.”

I looked at her, glad my smoke was blowing away from, rather
than toward, her, and followed her blissed-out gaze. And then a long, slow
“woooow” came out of me. Because it was beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Cayuga Lake
spread out below us, choppy and dark today. Moody. The way our rock jutted, it
was almost like we were flying over the water. Floating, at least.

I pulled my cell phone from the pocket of my denim shirt, which
I was using as a jacket, and took a couple of shots that I knew wouldn’t do it
justice. “Wish I had a real camera and a wide angle lens,” I muttered.

“It still doesn’t come out the same. I’ve tried it. There’s
nothing like being right here. It sort of feels like—like an energy place. You
know? A place of power?”

“It does.” I looked at the photos on my phone, realized she was
right—none of them did it justice—and set it down on the rock beside me.
“Speaking of power…”

“Were we?”

I met her eyes, saw the teasing light in them, realized how
much I truly liked this woman and nodded. “Yeah, we were. So, speaking of power,
why haven’t I been able to repeat what I did in the video?”

“Have you been trying?”

“Of course I’ve been trying. Hell, who wouldn’t? I keep going
back and watching the damn thing, trying to move just the same way, you know?
But nothing.”

Rayne nodded. “Well, you know power is never about ‘stand here
and hold your hand this way and say these words.’ I mean, that’s rote. Magic
comes from within.”

“I know that.”

“The words we say, the ways we move, those are just
tools—tricks, really—to make our psyche relax enough to let the true power
flow.”

“I know that, too. I read all the same books you did, you
know.”

She smiled, nodded. “So then I guess the pertinent question is,
why do you think you can’t repeat it?”

Because it’s not real.

But I’m way past that now, aren’t
I?

I took a deep drag, enjoying the hell out of my smoke and
wondering if they trained high priestesses to act like shrinks, because she sure
seemed to know how to make me find the answers inside myself. “I think it’s
because I’m not that person. I think she’s the one with the powers. Not me.”

“‘She’ being…”

I was looking toward that cave again. Rayne’s voice got lost on
the breeze.

“Indy?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Who is she?” she asked.

“My past self. The one who was shoved off a cliff in Bumfuck,
Babylonia, a gazillion years ago.” I smoked some more. My cigarette was burning
away while I was talking, and I hated like hell to waste it.

“But you are her. Part of you is, anyway.”

“I guess that’s where the disconnect is for me. Despite the
dreams, I don’t feel like I’m her. Even partly her.”
Trying
pretty hard to convince yourself, aren’t you, Indy?
“I feel like
she’s a person I wouldn’t even like all that much. Like if I met her, I’d want
to backhand her, you know?”

“Well, that might be it. If you feel conflict with her, then
you’re not accepting the part of you that
is
her.
And if you can’t accept her, then you can’t accept her powers. But they’re
your
powers, too. And you can tap into them if you
just let yourself. That video proves it.”

I lowered my head, took the last few puffs and then rubbed the
cigarette out on the rock. I tucked the butt into my pocket. Far be it from me
to go polluting such a beautiful spot.

As if I couldn’t help it, I looked at the cave again, then
forced my eyes back to Rayne. “She was…is…in love with your brother,” I told
her. “If I let her in—I’m afraid I will be, too.”

She was silent for a long moment. I was looking down at the
boulder beneath me, studying the patterns in the stone. Or pretending to.

And then her hand covered mine. “I think he’s having doubts
about continuing in the service of the Guardians, and maybe in the priesthood
itself. And I think those doubts were happening before all this started. At
least, that was the impression I was getting from our conversations.”

“Really? Because I sure as hell don’t want to be the cause of
him doing something he thinks will damn his soul to hellfire.”

“Oh, come on, we both know there’s no such thing.”

“Do we? There’s a freaking demon trying to get out of some sort
of underworld. Doesn’t that sort of shake your confidence in everything you
thought you knew before? ’Cause it sure as hell shakes mine.”

She hesitated, nodded. “Yeah, I guess it does.” Then she
sighed. “He can leave the priesthood and not be damned, though. I know there are
ways....”

“He will never do that.”

Last time he killed me rather than give up
his calling, after all.

The dark cave drew my eyes like a magnet.

I couldn’t even resist it long enough now to hold Rayne’s gaze.
I tried, several times, but my own kept shifting back to that black maw behind
the falls. “I have to go inside.”

And with that I slid off the rock and started forward, skirting
the bubbly pool until I got as close to the cave as I could, and then sloshing
through the icy water the rest of the way. I had to walk straight through the
waterfall. There was no other way to get to the darkness behind it, and I did,
even while Rayne was shouting at me to come back and calling me a friggin’
idiot, among other things.

I entered the cascade, darting quickly through it, but feeling
the jolt of the frigid water all the same. It soaked me to the skin, and I
emerged shaking myself and rigid with the shocking cold. And then I stood there,
looking into the pitch-darkness, my entire body leaning forward, my feet itching
to walk deeper inside, as if they had a will all their own.