Something Wicked (17 page)

And yeah, I seriously missed Ben. I would have liked to see his intense eyes and his dark, floppy curls. It was because I would have liked to see him smile at me again. But I’d pretty much taken care of the smiles, hadn’t I?

My large hotel room had a view of hot springs that flowed down scallop-shaped terraces, formed from the deposits in the water. The whole cliffside was covered with them! People were wading in the water, especially couples….

I wanted to be a couple. But it’s not like I deserved it.

No, I was on a hunt for Hekate. So after locking my belongings up, I asked for help from the concierge, then caught a minibus called a
dolmus
going in the right direction.

The driver couldn’t speak a word of English, but he said the name “Stratonikea” and nodded, smiling. He also chatted pleasantly with me over the hour-plus drive through the Turkish hills, between stops to pick up and let off other passengers. Instead of making me uncomfortable, I found the incomprehensible conversation strangely comforting.

This was the right place. I could feel it.

Me and Hekate. Hekate and me.

Here in…

“Stratonikea,” announced the bus driver, pulling over. I thanked him—in Turkish even,
te¸sekkür ederim
, like I’d heard on the train. He beamed at me as he said something that probably meant “you’re welcome.” It felt good to get out, to stretch my legs. Only once he drove away and I looked around did I have second thoughts.

Where the hell was this?

M
r. Bourikas frowned, unimpressed by the corpse sprawled across Victor’s bed. “We had hopes for you, Fisher,” he said in perfect, if accented, English. Then he lifted a crisp handkerchief to his nose. “But your discretion leaves much to be desired.”

As if the gypsy girl had been dead long enough to smell! They were against him, was all. Everyone was against him.

And still Victor would prevail.

“You don’t understand,” he insisted, pacing, running a hand through his hair. When was the last time he’d had a haircut? Not important. “You have no idea how powerful I’ve become, even without the cup!”

Bourikas’s lip curled. “The Comitatus already has the power to kill women.”

Idiot! If this was the power of the Comitatus, no wonder they were letting a handful of witches run circles around them. “This wasn’t about killing her,” explained Victor, very patiently. “It was about getting her to scry for me.”

The last few days had been a blur—there had been the magic, then the horror. That part was a test, of course. Then he’d been
somewhere else
for what seemed like a very, very long time. But once he’d returned to himself and seen that the proof of his magic had vanished, he’d known what he had to do. He had the power, he knew that now. He just needed the technique.

Luckily, Athens had gypsies—and a lot of them still advertised as fortune-tellers.

Stupid Bourikas wasn’t even curious enough to ask about scrying. But that had been the Comitatus’s problem all along, hadn’t it? They rejected magic. “I have to ask if you’ve left any written records about our society or our quest,” the Greek said now. “I must urge you, for the sake of your loved ones and your legacy, to make any such documents available to us. I cannot stress enough the importance of our continued secrecy.”

Vic slowed in his pacing, then grinned. And these were the kind of men who
were
accepted into the secret society? “Do you realize, that’s almost word for word what you guys said to my parents before you gutted them?”

Bourikas lunged at him, then. But Victor had seen this before, long before….

“I’m going back!” he announced, six years old all over again.

“Mommy said to run.” That was Benny, always so ready to do what he was told, even scared. “She said to get help!”

He had Vic’s hand, pulling on him hard. But the sound of their father’s scream from the room beyond, gargling to an abrupt stop, startled him so much that his grip loosened.

“
Then
you
get help.” Vic pulled free, hurried deeper into the house. “I’m gonna see.”

“Mommy said to watch each other!”

Benny sounded like he was going to cry. But Vic didn’t care. He had to see what was going on. He had to! He rounded the corner….

Anyway, he knew what was coming. It was almost too easy to catch the man’s arm, to turn the serrated knife—

To drive it to the hilt, into Bourikas’s chest. Right past the ribs and…yeah, deep. Like that. Just like the men in black had done to Mommy.

Even he didn’t have the strength to easily pull the knife back out, so Vic let go, shaking his head in annoyance. “You really don’t get it. Neither did Prescott, when I called him about this. There really is power in magic. Dark power. I’ve seen it. I’ve
felt
it.”

Hell, he’d wielded it.

The Greek businessman, envoy for the local Comitatus, opened his mouth like a fish and gurgled. Blood welled up over his bottom lip as he dropped to his knees, stunned.

“That’s why I had the bitch scry for me,” Vic explained, flourishing his hand toward the corpse on his bed. “Prescott wouldn’t help me. You wouldn’t help me. But she did. Now I don’t merely know where Kate Trillo
is.
I know where she’s
going to be.
Let’s see your precious warrior society top
that.
”

Bourikas fell to his side, open eyes blind now, open mouth silent. What a freaking letdown.

Oh, well. Since he’d discovered magic, Vic had more important reasons for finding the Hekate Chalice than the Comitatus. Who needed some secret society that might deign to let him in at the bottom of their precious pyramid structure?

Screw that! Not when he liked to be on top.

Before he left, Vic made sure to tidy up. He collected Bourikas’s blood on a tissue, for future use. He took the condom he’d worn earlier, and the towel he’d used to clean up afterward, so that he wouldn’t have to face any more of that damned DNA evidence. Not that the gypsy girl had been worth the effort, but hell—without Katie around, her very presence drawing him, he’d thought it couldn’t hurt, right?

He put plastic on Bourikas’s chest before using his foot as leverage to yank the knife out. After wiping his prints off it, he folded the weapon into the gypsy girl’s hand.

There. Nice and neat. Good enough to buy him time to leave the country, anyway.

“Thanks for the lesson in fortune-telling,” he told the dead gypsy, with his most charming smile. The one women couldn’t resist. And for the Comitatus? “And thanks for nothing.”

Now. Time to claim the powers of hell for himself.

Stratonikea stood in the middle of absolute nowhere. From the highway, I’d thought there was a village just up the hill. But as I hiked higher up the gravel road, I saw differently. The cluster of charming houses, with their faded plaster walls and quaint, red-tiled roofs, was deserted and falling apart. A sulfur smell hung heavy across the whole area. As I topped the hill and saw what lay just beyond, I guessed I knew why.

Stratonikea was even worse off than Eleusis. What lingered of the ancient city sat atop grass and stony dirt, with some short, scrubby trees here and there. Ruins outnumbered the trees, though—the rubble of partial foundations, segments of crumbling wall and columns that only went halfway up, as if they’d been partly erased by the gray sky.

Around it stretched a modern wasteland. Mining of some kind.

“Hello, progress,” I muttered darkly.

The city, which Maggi had said once held one of the earliest known temples to Hekate, was in pieces. The village I’d first spotted had apparently been built among the ruins. Now the village itself had been shut down by mining.

Damn, it was depressing.

And on top of everything, a rumble in the sky drew my attention to the horizon, where the sky darkened ominously.

Goody. Storm coming.

Still, it wasn’t like another
dolmus
would come by right away, even if they did run regularly. This place was frequented often enough to have signs pointing toward it and a rock road leading up to it.

And I’d come here for a reason.

So I readjusted my backpack, heavy with the supplies I’d been able to collect, and hiked over the hillside. I might as well explore this place that had once, over two thousand years ago, worshipped my namesake. If Hekate’s sacred cup had been hidden at her source, it hopefully would be here.

Somewhere.

The oddest thing about Stratonikea wasn’t the smell from the surrounding mines. It wasn’t the hauntingly empty houses. Some of those were very large and displayed ragged remains of beauty in their intricate trim or Arabic-style doors—where the plaster wasn’t falling off and leaving gaping holes in the wall, anyway. It wasn’t even the eerie effect of the ruins, where solid walls suddenly descended into piles of stone blocks, or ornate stone gateways arched upward into broken nothingness. The once-white rock displayed all shades of gray, streaked black with age. Some hardy vines grew over the arches. And still, that wasn’t it.

No, the oddest part was not having a tour guide.

If only Ben were here, he could probably have told me what kinds of foundations had been temples. Maybe Eleni could have read what an inscription said, carved by the crumbled remains of some small, long-lost building.

Instead, it was all up to me. I had to figure things out for myself. So…I did.

The line of masonry that came and went, until it vanished behind mining equipment—that would have been the wall surrounding the city. Just down the hill from the first building, an arena or theater had been dug into the hillside. The steps, or maybe they were seats, had grass growing between some of them, but they remained all the same.

I shivered and started to hike. And the longer I looked, the more starkly beautiful it all became.

In one place, broken-off columns and the bottom half of an archway fronted steps down to a still pond, framed by more stone. Was that on purpose, or the effect of sinking rock and a wet winter? In another area, shattered lengths of column tumbled so closely with carved stone moldings that they could have been building blocks in a child’s toy box. Some of the column drums were hollow, holding more water.

Unlike at the Acropolis, I could touch these souvenirs of the past. I could run my hands across the pleated fluting of the columns. I could brace my feet on their base and boost myself up, standing as high as I could to look into any hollow pieces I found.

Thunder rumbled more loudly, echoing back off the desolate hillside. The darkening clouds loomed slowly closer. And I kept on exploring. Because I wasn’t here as a tourist, after all.

I had a curse to break…or at least edit. I had a grail to find.

But it wasn’t here.

I walked through gates that led nowhere—gateways and doorways are sacred to Hekate—but I found nothing. I pressed my hands, my cheek against a single whole, smooth column, but felt nothing. I walked down an ancient road that was in better shape than the gravel road leading here, and went nowhere in particular. Oh, I sensed the age of the place. I even sensed an ancient, powerful presence that reminded me of Hekate. But a cup?

No cup. No goddess.

When the storm hit, it hit hard. One minute I was climbing unevenly up to the top of a wall, to get a better view of the rest of the ruins. The next, I heard a rattling, like hard wind in trees—and saw a sheet of rain coming at me, masking the landscape behind it.

I jumped to the ground, scooped up my backpack and took off for the nearest of the village houses. My feet flew over the stony ground. But the rain outran me, soaked me in a cold instant. Even when I managed to jump through a gaping, glassless window into what had once been a manor home, it gave iffy shelter. Rain dripped through holes in the roof and blew in sideways through the blank, open windows.

With a crash, lightning lit the ruins outside. Damn!

Then everything vanished into the gray again. And it only got blacker.

After a few minutes, I peeled off my wet coat. I hunkered shivering into a corner to wait out the storm, and thought,
What the hell am I doing here?

“You’re living,”
said Diana, rolling her eyes.
“Don’t complain.”

I was so glad to see her. “I’d trade places with you in a minute, you know. You had so much to give the world.”

“That’s why those kinds of decisions aren’t left up to you, doofus.”
She sat, cross-legged, in front of me.
“Look at you, Miss World Traveler!”

I didn’t smile. “Why do I keep seeing you, Diana?”

“Duh! Hekate is the goddess who leads dead souls to the afterlife. If anyone can manage a ghost or two, it’s Her.”

Or two? But she’d vanished again. Standing, I found a stick amongst the rubble and I drew a large circle around myself, through the dirt and leaf litter that covered what might have once been marble floors.

I tried not to think about the people who had lived here, who must have loved this place…who were dead. It was too sad.

I didn’t have torches, like the ones Eleni had brought to Eleusis, so instead I put a symbol of each element at each point of the circle…or as near as I could guess without a compass. I put a chunk of white-and-gray marble at the north point, for Earth. I lit two sticks of incense from my pack, sandalwood and cypress, to signify Air with its smoke for the East. I put the matches at the southernmost point for Fire. And for Water?

Okay, so there was so much water around here at the moment, I could barely escape it. Still, it would be nice to have something to put it in. Digging through my pack, I withdrew the one votive candle I’d carried. It sat in a small holder, about the size of a shot glass. That would do.

I took it out into the rain, to collect fresh water.

Chunks of marble from ancient walls or steps littered the ground mere feet from the ruined house. Rain splattered hard off long-fallen columns, the power of nature continuing long after man-made structures crumbled.

The least witchy person in the world feels the power of a rainstorm, don’t they? Not just the electrical charge of lightning, but the noise of the thunder, the force of the wind, the cleansing of the water and that wonderful, sharp air…I suspected Ben could explain why air in a storm smelled so alive. In magic terms, Water is the element of dreams and psychic images. It’s the element of the emotions. If I was going to
feel
the Hekate Grail anywhere around here, Water was the element that would help me.

Sometime after rain had filled the votive holder, I returned, drenched, to the partial shelter of the abandoned manor home. The water went in the West, where it belonged. And I knelt in the center of my circle and lit the little candle.

I’d been working on my rhyme since the train.

“Here I’ve come to seek the chalice,

Here I’ve come to gain the grail,

Help me, Hekate, to find it,

Clear my vision, lift the veil.

Let me see where I should seek it

If, indeed, it should be sought.

Lead me, Lady, to thy chalice.

By the power—”

With a crash, light shot through the open, glassless windows—and I let out a surprised scream.

Because the man standing in the shadowy corner of the cobwebby room was either Ben or Victor Fisher.

And whoever he was, I hadn’t seen him come in.