Something Wicked

I
can tell you exactly when I became a bad guy. I can describe it down to the very moment, as abrupt as…

As the blow of a hammer.

My knees squelched in blood-soaked carpet where I’d landed, trembling, beside my older sister’s body. At that moment, the shock was too fresh even for tears. My mouth gaped into a scream beyond sound. Not Diana. No….

But I’d been a hospice nurse for three years; I was no stranger to death. Although I hadn’t embraced our family tradition of witchcraft like Diana had—witchcraft as in goddess-worship, I mean, not that fantasy TV stuff—my instincts were solid. And despite my sister’s mottled face, now caked with blood, I knew her too well to find any comfort in denial.

She’d been my constant in life. My guide. My friend. I’d once badly braided that long, golden hair, so different from my own, now streaked with more blood—we’d laughed, and posed and taken pictures. I’d often held those now broken hands, still wearing their ever-present silver rings. They’d held me, countless times, especially after losing our parents. And Diana’s necklace…

Most witches wear pentagrams, point-up. The women in my family wear an overlapping circle design that our
nonna
called a
“vesica piscis.”
It’s nowhere near as common.

The pendant hanging limp from this dead woman’s throat looked just like Mom’s had. Just like the one lying forgotten in my bureau drawer.

This was her.

Somehow, impossible as it seemed, I now existed in a world where my big sister did not. Was not. Would not.

Sound, ugly and hurt, moaned from my throat. The room around me shrank—our small home’s living room where we’d sat up to watch movies, to play games, to trade gossip.

I should be doing something, right?

In that moment, I didn’t know or care what that might be. Diana….

Our belongings littered the floor. CDs and remote controls mixed with the detritus of my sister’s magical interests—tarot cards, rune stones, crystals. A tapestry of Greek ruins fluttered, half-torn from the wall—she’d always wanted to visit Greece. A tumble of tools, screwdrivers and pliers and a scattering of cup hooks and nails, looked incongruous amidst calligraphed pages ripped from her Book of Shadows. All the tools had pink plastic handles. We’d gotten the kit a few years earlier.
Magic can’t fix everything,
I’d joked. Now, blinking past a blur of tears, I found myself counting pieces. Screwdriver. Wrench. The one most obviously missing was…

The hammer.

Perhaps instinct warned me, or common sense, or even Diana’s lingering spirit.

With a gasp, I threw myself away from her body as the bloody hammer arced down at me.

Metal bit into floorboards the carpet couldn’t protect. I rolled through blood and tarot cards and stumbled to my feet. My crepe-soled shoes squelched in the damp, and my arm felt sticky and cold. The air smelled metallic, deathly.

And a stranger,
a killer,
straightened to full height not three feet from me. His dark eyes shone. His angular face was speckled with Diana’s blood.

Right there, he stood.
This was real.

“Katie, right?” His friendly grin chilled me, even more than his easy, urban voice. “The kid sister. Wow. You should have driven slower tonight, Katie. This, you know…it complicates things.”

“Because now you won’t get away with it?” I barely recognized my own, flat voice. Emotion hurled itself against the lingering wall of my shock, a battering ram of pain—but it hadn’t gotten through yet. The amount that whimpered from my throat and burned in my eyes was nothing next to what fought to escape.

His grin widened, showing dimples. His hair, cut neat and short, was as dark as mine, and his charisma was like a spell. If it weren’t for a prominent nose, he’d be gorgeous. How could I even notice that, past all the blood?

And past the dead sister.
No….

I felt sick.

“Like that’s going to happen.” He raised the hammer to shoulder height and waggled his heavy eyebrows, downright playful. “Sure, you’re trouble, but let’s not get above ourselves. Face it, Katie. You’re as good as dead.”

Numb or not, I acted. Pretty sure I couldn’t outrun him, I backed away, sweeping my arm out to find something, anything for a weapon. Magazine? No. A throw pillow? Hardly. My hand closed on our answering machine, and I threw that instead. He laughed as he dodged. The phone bounced after the machine—

The phone! Scooping it up, I started to punch the magic numbers, 9-1—

In a rush, the killer reached me. The hammer caught my hand so hard that I didn’t even feel it at first, just saw the receiver fly across the room and only then, as if on a time delay—

Pain.
Like, broken-bone pain.

Once that burst through, the rest of my horror swept after it. The sound escaping me became an ungodly, animal-like wail. I grabbed a floor lamp, sparks flying as the cord jerked from an outlet, but it made a lousy one-handed weapon. His pink-handled hammer,
our
hammer, knocked it aside—

Then the killer had me against the wall, one forearm hard across my throat, his thigh pinning my legs, his minty-fresh breath in my face. My right hand throbbed, agonizing, with every clutch of my heart. I wished I were one of those women who knew martial arts or kickboxing. I wasn’t. He had me too tight to slip loose, and I was too short to head-butt even someone as average height as him. And damn it, my sister was dead.

My sister. My sister. My sister.

In that moment, as the madman’s bright, long-lashed eyes laughed down at me, even survival barely mattered. But justice…

Suddenly, I knew how people became ghosts. Because not even death would stop my need for vengeance.

I only had two measly weapons left. One was my femininity. I’d already guessed that much from the flush of heat off of him, the way his breath caught in his tanned, clean-shaven throat.
He was turned on by this!

So I tipped my face up toward him and parted my lips as if I was as twisted as him. I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “At least tell me your name.”

“It’s…Ben,” he offered, eyes gleaming at my unspoken invitation. “Benny Fisher.”

That had been awfully easy. But hey, he didn’t mean to leave me alive. Why wouldn’t he tell me?

Except that his name added ammunition to my second weapon.

My sister’s blood. And my own.

My good hand went for his face. He caught me by the wrist, I’m not one of those warrior women, remember? But I wrenched my shoulders sideways, smeared my elbow—wet with Diana’s blood—across his slanted jaw.

And I said, “I curse you, Ben.”

The rush of strength that flooded me in that moment—even coming from a family of witches, I’d never imagined magic to be like that. It wasn’t special-effects fantasy magic, of course. But my spine straightened, and the throbbing in my hand faded under a stronger focus. My body shuddered with power. The power of anger. The power of vengeance. The power of standing up for myself. All aimed at him.

And something else. Something far, far older.
Waking.

Whether from that power, or just surprise, Fisher drew back and blinked.

The words came like a recovered memory. “I wish you
agony,
Ben Fisher,” I hissed, my voice thick with dark hope. When I took a step forward, he fell inches back. “I wish you
despair.
I wish you a long, lingering death that lasts forever too long until you scream for it to be over and still it goes on and on because release is too good for you.”

He shook his head with an uneven laugh, unnerved but quickly recovering himself. “Shut up, Katie.”

“Before that comes, I wish you a lonely, empty, suffering life where nobody loves you and everything you care about shrivels and dies.” I was practically shouting my curse, now, glorying in it and in the desperate hope that it might work, that there was justice after all. When he killed me, I wanted to die believing in justice. “For every moment of happiness you’ve stolen from my sister and me, Ben Fisher, may you know lifetimes of misery.”

“Damn! You’re as crazy as she is!”

Was,
I thought, and bitterness gave me the strength to pull the magical trigger. “I call upon Hekate, the Dark Goddess, to oversee your downfall, Ben Fisher. In Her name,
I curse you!
”

He attacked with a panicked swing of the hammer, right at my face. Since I’m as bad at dodging as I am at fighting, he hit. The world reeled around me, or maybe that was me reeling. I heard as much as felt myself fall against the wall, a muffled thud. I slid down it, tasted my own blood, then blinked dazedly upward. The killer with the expensive haircut and dark, pretty eyes stepped closer, lifted the girly, deadly hammer—

And the door slammed open.

Maybe I hadn’t securely latched it behind me when I’d found Diana’s body. And this was February in Chicago, the Windy City itself. But as a hard wind pushed through the room, tossing bits of snow and whipping my black hair across my face, Ben Fisher’s surreally pleasant expression faltered.

“I curse you,” I repeated a second time, through a mouthful of my own blood, and I spat a tooth at his crisply ironed trousers, for good measure.

Blood makes for classic curses.

The icy wind moaned, tarot cards somersaulted across the floor and Fisher had had enough. He turned and ran, though not before grabbing something from the cabinet Diana had used as an altar. I surged forward to follow—

Or not.

I fell to my side, tried to catch myself with my injured hand, screamed in the resulting pain. Tears weren’t the only thing blurring my vision.
Head wound,
some part of me noted clinically.
Possible concussion. Call an ambulance. Put the teeth in milk and maybe they can be saved….

But he was getting away! And really, there’s not that much magical power in reciting something twice.

If I did nothing else right, in my whole life, the shock and pain and fury that choked me at this moment meant this had to be correct. And yeah, I knew the dangers. I knew the rules. Just because I hadn’t seriously studied the Craft like Diana had didn’t mean I hadn’t picked things up.

Feeling myself list, darkness tunneling my vision, I fumbled for the closest piece of paper. I found the back of a page from Diana’s Book of Shadows. I scrubbed my good hand across the bloody carpet by my sister’s corpse, and I wiped it across my own blood-slick chin, and I used my finger to write, in her blood and in mine,
“Ben Fisher.”

I rolled the page into an uneven tube. I found a nail. Since Fisher had taken the hammer, I grabbed a remote control.

“In the name of Hekate,” I mumbled, dizzy now, hurting, weeping. “The Dark Goddess. Queen of the Night. Goddess of the Crossroads. In the name of Her, my namesake, I curse thee, Ben Fisher, to everlasting torment!”

And I used the remote to slam the nail through the page, completing the spell.

I felt the nail drive home just as the remote hit the injured hand with which I’d steadied it. At that, I passed out.

That was it.

That’s when I turned to the dark side.

For one thing, magic has consequences. Better to smack someone across the face than work a spell against them, Diana had always said, because the spell will come back at you with three times the strength. In cursing the man who’d killed my sister, I’d cursed myself.

Which, on its own, might have been so worth it.

But the rest of it…the rest of it didn’t become clear right off. I came to. I phoned for help. I dealt with paramedics, cops, doctors. I dealt with my aunts and uncles and surviving grandparents. It was awful. A decade hadn’t been long enough for us to get over my parents’ loss, and now this?

A death in the family is bad enough, but murder guaranteed a nightmare. After my parents’ death, only a tight grip on Diana’s hand had gotten me through the funeral arrangements and the paperwork and the obituaries. Now we added yellow crime-scene tape, and unrelenting calls from reporters and, as an extra fun-time bonus, a next-day lineup.

“Him,” I said immediately, as soon as the six suspects filed into the room beyond the glass partition. I didn’t feel evil, yet. I didn’t feel much of anything except dizzying grief. Shock. Anger. And no small amount of pain. “Number four.”

My jaw still hurt, where I’d had two of the three injured teeth replanted in an emergency trip to my family dentist, resulting in a dental splint that made my tongue sore, and the promise of a bridge where my first molar couldn’t be saved. My broken hand, now cast in plaster, still throbbed. The doctor had actually said I was lucky, that “the ring metacarpal shaft fracture was stable, with no rotation of the bone fragments or secondary nerve injury.” Very lucky.

Like I was in any mood to count my blessings.

My sister was dead!
That bastard, right there, had killed her.

“You’re sure?” asked some guy in a suit. Lawyer?

As if I could ever forget that balanced, compact stature, that angular face, those dark eyes. That nose….

“You,” said my cousin Ray, who’s a cop, to the suit. “Shut it.”

Except that something didn’t fit. Maybe it was how his black hair, so neat the night before, now fell in unruly curls across his face. His dark, haunted gaze swept from one side of the room to the other, as if thinking hard or memorizing it.

“That’s the man I saw,” I insisted. “Ben Fisher.” The name felt extra significant in my mouth, and I knew I was right. Except…“He looks sad.”

Cousin Ray said, “Yeah, well, getting arrested for murder can be a real bummer. Let’s get you home.”

On the snowy ride back to his parents’ place, where I’d be staying for the next few days, I silently tasted the killer’s name and thought about the curse. Was that why they’d caught Ben Fisher so easily? Because I’d cursed him? After years of abstaining from magic,
could it be that simple?

Problem was, I’d cursed myself, too. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Ray had to bring me back to the station the next day for a second lineup, this time with moral support. Aunt Maria scolded him from the backseat the whole way there—wasn’t it enough that the bastard had murdered my sister without me having to face him over and over? From Ray’s tight expression as he drove, though, I knew something else was wrong, and I told him so.