Mark of the Witch (27 page)

“I’m sorry? You’ll have to speak up, and talk slowly. There’s a
storm coming in and you’re breaking up pretty badly.”

“You…not a priest.”

He blinked, lifted his chin, swallowed hard. “I’m not a priest.
Am I understanding you correctly?”
Could it be over and
done that easily? Wouldn’t there be more to it than just—

“You never were.”

The static had suddenly cleared. The words came through crisp
and perfectly audible. “What does that mean?”

“We have no record of your ordination. You don’t need the
dispensation or the release. There are no vows to break, as far as the Church is
co…erned. It…on’t…oh…ee…at—”

Silence. He glanced at the screen. Dropped Call.

He felt…numb. He didn’t know what to make of what he’d just
been told. Had there been a paperwork snafu?

Then he looked at the closed door and knew better. For the love
of God, could this possibly have been one more of Father Dom’s
manipulations?

It was entirely possible, he realized. Dom had yanked him out
of seminary, told him he was needed, chosen by God for a mission so important
he’d been granted special dispensation to…

“To ordain me himself. Oh, my God. It was never real. It was
never real....”

He put down the phone and sat there for long moments, staring
into nothingness. He didn’t feel regret. He didn’t feel sadness. He felt…empty,
confused about who and what he was, if he wasn’t a priest. At the same time, he
felt…relieved. And guilty for feeling relieved.

A tap came on the closed door of the den.

He lifted his head slowly and pulled himself to his feet,
checking to be sure his eyes were dry before going to the door and pausing for a
moment with his hand on the knob before pulling it open.

Indy was standing there. She’d put on blue pajamas with bunnies
all over them. Her hair looked like she’d been running her hands through it
repeatedly. She had a giant plateful of assorted cookies surrounding two glasses
of milk in one hand and the parchment scrolls in the other. He looked from the
cookies to the scrolls to her face.

She was smiling as she said, “It’s going to be okay, Tomas. I
know what happened now. This has all been a terrible mistake.”

Send me a sign, he’d prayed. He’d thought the phone call had
been his answer. But no. Now he thought maybe his sign was wearing bunny
pajamas, and carrying cookies and milk.

“So? You gonna let me in so I can tell you about it?”

He looked into her eyes. They were so familiar. This was just
the way he imagined an old man felt when he looked into the eyes of the woman
he’d spent his entire life loving. It felt that intimate, that deep, that
real.

That old.

He opened the door wider. “Never could resist cookies and
milk.”

“Why the hell do you think I brought them?” she asked with a
grin. She came into the den, kicked the door closed behind her and set the plate
on the table, frowning at the glasses and the whiskey bottle that were already
there. “That’s a really bad idea, Tomas.”

“I know.”

“We need to stay sharp, stay alert, until we make it through
this.”

“I know.”

“I mean, even if the demon isn’t really the villain you think
he is, he’s still powerful. Maybe dangerous.”

“The demon’s not a villain?” he said.

“Not even a real demon, I think. But he still thinks we’re the
enemy. Or that you are, at least.”

“Well, he’s got that right.”

“But you’re not. You’ll see.” She sat down on the sofa and
unrolled the scrolls. “I’m going to tell you a bedtime story, Tomas. And I want
you to listen with a completely open mind. Can you do that? Can you forget all
Father’s Dom’s indoctrination and pretend you know nothing about any of this as
you hear the truth?”

Frowning, Tomas sank onto the leather sofa next to her. “What
makes you so sure it’s the truth?”

“It was written by an eyewitness.”

He blinked, stunned, part of him wondering if she was as crazy
as Father Dom. But no. He knew better. He’d seen her power with his own
eyes.

Then again, he’d seen Dom’s, too, with that possessed little
girl. Power did not necessarily indicate sanity. Good tip to remember.

He reached for a handful of Oreos and one of the glasses of
milk. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. “I’ll do my best. I’m listening,
Indy. Talk to me.”

* * *

“I’ve already read every line of this tale,” I told
Tomas, making myself comfortable. I turned and leaned back against the arm,
curling my legs beneath me, and though I unrolled the sheets of parchment, I
didn’t intend to read them to him. I didn’t have to. “It’s a bit under twenty
pages, and there’s a lot of extraneous information. Not to me, of course. It’s
all important to me. I figured out about halfway through that I knew the next
line, the next word, before I read it. And I realized that was because I was the
one who had written it.”

His eyes popped open, and he sat up quickly. “You wrote
it?”

“In that other lifetime. I trust it.”

“All right,” he said.

“I was Indira then, too. Indira, daughter of the potter, at
first, and later, once I was taken with my sisters into the royal harem, I was
known only as the King’s Indira.”

He nodded, and he didn’t lean back again but instead leaned
forward for another cookie, his eyes on me, eager, but also a little bit
fearful. “Go on.”

“My sisters were Magdalena and Lilia. Lilia was the king’s
favorite, but she fell in love with his first lieutenant.”

He lifted his brows. “Like Lancelot and Guinevere.”

“Exactly like that. But the ending takes its own turn. His name
was Demetrius.”

I gave a quick look around me as I said the name aloud for the
first time, half expecting some sort of repercussion to speaking the name that
‘must not be spoken.’ But nothing happened. And I thought again that Tomas’s
mission was all bullshit propaganda, perpetrated by a long line of so-called
holy men.

“Magdalena and I tried hard to protect the two of them from
being found out. But I never told my sisters about my own secret liaison with a
young Priest of Marduk, the sun god, whose name I never wrote down, for fear
someone would find him out and punish him.”

He stared into my eyes.

I stared right back, then lowered mine to read a passage. “‘He
loved me like no man has ever loved. I never doubted it. And I loved him just as
fiercely. And yet our love, like my sister’s, was forbidden.’” Hot tears came to
my eyes as old, old emotions rose up in my heart. I couldn’t look him in the
eyes just then.

“Someone ratted out my sister and her lover. Soldiers raided
the harem quarters and caught them together. Demetrius fought to protect her—to
protect all of us—but he was outnumbered, and in the end we were all arrested.
As they searched our quarters and questioned our harem mates, they learned
another secret we’d been keeping.”

He searched my eyes, riveted by the story.

“We were practicing magic. Witchcraft. And that was strictly
forbidden. Only the high priest of the Temple, Sindar, was allowed to cast and
conjure. He was the one who said that we should be offered as sacrifices to
Marduk to appease his anger. Demetrius, when he heard what our fate would be,
broke free of his chains and went on a rampage. He killed the king, along with
several of his soldiers, and was beaten nearly to death by the rest.”

Tomas closed his eyes, lowered his head. “Poor bastard.”

I knew then that he had no idea what I would tell him as my
story went on.

I lowered my head, flipping pages that were filled with what no
doubt appeared to him to be ancient symbols and glyphs but were, to me, as clear
as they had been on the day I’d written out my tale. “The high priest loved the
king beyond all others. I wrote that I always suspected it was the same sort of
love I felt for my young priest and just as forbidden, but that Sindar would
never admit that, even to himself. Still, he was determined to inflict the worst
sort of punishment he could imagine on Demetrius for killing his beloved
king.”

Tomas nodded. “He was the man who was forced to watch while the
three of you were executed, wasn’t he?” he asked.

“Yes. But that was kind compared to what Sindar had in store
for him next. He was sentenced to be cursed. Immediately after we were pushed
from the cliff to our deaths on the rocks below, Demetrius was to be taken into
a dark cave by Sindar alone, where he would undergo a spell that would strip the
soul from his body. Then his throat was to be cut. His soulless spirit was sent
to the Underworld, where he would be held captive in the land of the dead
forevermore. His stolen soul would be destroyed in an elaborate ritual that the
high priest would perform solo.”

Tomas’s eyes widened. Yeah. He was starting to get it now.

“No one bothered keeping their intentions secret. I think
Sindar liked us all knowing what was going to happen to us. Torturing us with
the knowledge. Torturing Demetrius by letting him know Lilia would be killed.
Torturing Lilia by letting her know Demetrius would be sentenced to a fate far
worse than death. Eternity in darkness.”

“It’s hideous,” Tomas whispered.

“My sisters and I made a plan. We cast a spell of our own, and
we meditated and focused all our will on carrying it out, not even knowing if it
would work. When we crossed the veil between life and death, the instant our
bodies hit the rocks below the cliff and our souls were torn from them, we
planned to fly into that dark cave and snatch Demetrius’s soul before Sindar
could destroy it. We intended to divide it between us, hiding it within whatever
sacred objects we could find—because a soul needs to be bound to the physical
realm to keep it from being reabsorbed into the whole. We planned to then bind
the objects to ourselves, taking them with us into the afterlife, where they
would remain until we called them forth again in a future lifetime.”

He was blinking as if exposed to a sudden bright light. “And
did you succeed?”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t very well have written it down if we
had, since I would have been dead by that point. But I do know that the entire
plan hinged on the help of one living being. The man I loved, the young priest.
You, Tomas. I had planned to give you a vial containing three drops of my blood
and three drops of the blood of each of my sisters, and ask that you somehow get
it into that cave to enable our spirits to find our way there so we could
accomplish our task.”

He closed his eyes. “It’s doubtful I did it, though. I couldn’t
have pushed you from that cliff if I truly loved you, Indy.”

“Then why is it that there are three witches, each one supposed
to call forth a magical tool from the astral plane? Why is it that those tools
are supposed to help free a so-called demon from the Underworld?”

“I don’t know. I don’t…I don’t know, Indy. I admit it fits
pretty well—”

“It fits perfectly. Dom got it wrong. And that’s because he’s
been going by the version of the story written by Sindar and handed down by
centuries of priests. Sindar wouldn’t have made himself the bad guy, would
he?”

“No, I don’t suppose—”

“History is written by the victors, isn’t that what they say?
But I wrote a history of my own, before they killed me.”

“Before
I
killed you, you
mean.”

“Let it go, Tomas. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m
not supposed to help free a demon to wreak havoc on mankind. I’m supposed to
return one small part of an innocent man’s soul to him, to help release him from
an undeserved sentence.”

He met my eyes. I could see he was hearing me. Perhaps even
believing me.

“Tomas, destroying the amulet means destroying an innocent
man’s soul. Don’t you see that?”

He stared into my eyes for a long moment, and then suddenly the
clouds in his own seemed to clear. “I’ve been misled,” he whispered.

“Dom is just a tool. He’s been used by a higher power, just not
in the way he thinks. His job was never to destroy Demetrius or keep him
imprisoned. It was to bring us together so that we could find the truth. And we
have. His work is done, Tomas.”

He nodded.

I blinked, because he wasn’t arguing. “Do you…do you agree with
me?”

“Yes. I do. You’re right. This makes sense. It all fits.”

Man, that was way easier than I expected. I swallowed hard,
squared my shoulders and jumped back in for round two. “I want you to send him
away now.”

“I already have. He’s leaving in the morning.”

I smiled slowly, letting the beautiful pages roll up again. I
gently tied the leather cord around them and set the scrolls on the small stand
beside the sofa. “You sent him away even before you knew…”

“Yes.”

“But…I thought you believed he was right about the demon.”

“Not as much as I believe in you,” he said. “And not as much as
I believe that what I feel for you is real, and vital, and too much a part of me
to ever deny, and that there’s no way what’s between us can be wrong or…or
evil.”

Tears burned in my eyes as his hand came to my cheek, resting
gently there. And then he kissed me, and I knew it was all going to be all
right. Together we would go to the Portal on Samhain Eve—tomorrow night. We
would go, and I would say the incantation that would come to my lips as if on
its own. It would free the amulet from my body, freeing Demetrius’s soul-piece
from the amulet and returning it to him. It was all I had to do. And then
this—or at least my part in it—would be over.

It was the right thing to do. I felt it right to my toes.

Tomas was seeing it now. Thank the gods, all of them, I
thought, and then I stopped thinking as his kiss changed into something deeper.
He cradled my head in his hands, his tongue dipping and tasting my mouth as he
lowered me backward onto the sofa.