The Hex Witch of Seldom (19 page)

But the black mustang did not run away at once. He reared with an angry scream and struck at her with his forefeet, almost killing her where she stood—almost. The stallion swerved just before his deadly hooves struck her head, her breast. Then he turned his back on her and thundered away.

That was a hundred years ago. And the mayor's daughter had long since died, her name forgotten except, perhaps, by one living being. But the black mustang had run on the tablelands and mesas since. He was of the Twelve. He would not die, only take different forms.

So the tale ran, or the dream—except it sometimes seemed to Bobbi that she had it wrong, that the man in black was a Spanish gentleman in old Mexico, or a riverboat gambler, or a British earl, though his fate remained the same—

But that was absurd. How would a British earl have come to Wyoming?

Bobbi jolted fully awake because Witchie reached back and prodded her with Kabilde. She sat up, peering into darkness. It was still night, the darkest, most eerie time of night, the time when all sane people are asleep. Without needing a clock she could feel that.

The gypsy turned off the engine. Silent, the Mercedes drifted to a stop. Without speaking, without slamming the car doors, the three of them got out. Bobbi stretched and looked around her. Trees. Steep ridges going up to either side of the road. Overhead, night sky.

“The new moon holds the old moon in her arms,” the gypsy muttered, very low.

Bobbi also was looking at the sliver of crescent moon overhead, the gray-black form of the full circle visible in its embrace.

“It is a bad omen,” the gypsy said, real fear in his voice, though he still kept it low. “Come, let us go back. We feast you again.”

“We can't go back,” said Witchie, just as softly.

“What can you do against the trickster under the dark circle?” the man pleaded. “Hazel lady, come away.”

Bobbi had made out the dim line of a rutted lane leading into the woods. “Is Shane up there?” she whispered to Witchie.

“Yes.”

“Then come on! Let's go find him!”

But the gypsy would not go. No matter how much he wanted to atone for the misdeed of one purported to be his ancestor, he could not make himself go. In the end it was just Witchie and Bobbi who walked up the shadowy lane where Samuel Bissel had taken Shane.

Chapter Fourteen

They walked up the rutted lane under the ominous moon.

“Is this the Hub where we're going?” Bobbi asked Witchie.

“My golly days, no, girl.”

“Well, where—”

“Hush. Quiet from now on. Chances are better if we catch him by surprise.”

The old woman walked on, slowly, taking her time, as quietly as an Indian, a cat. Bobbi felt big-boned and clumsy behind her, following her up the steep lane through woods.

It ended in a clearing of sorts, an abandoned, half-overgrown hilltop farm. Moonlight and shadow made a crazy quilt of the former pasture: a jumble of cedars, blackberry, sumac, and the boulders piled where long-ago glaciers had carelessly left them. In the middle of the pasture stood a black, boxy shape: the buggy.

Bobbi and Witchie drifted close—no easy matter, on the terrain—then crouched behind rocks to reconnoiter.

“Bissel's sleeping underneath the buggy,” Witchie breathed, very low.

Bobbi did not answer or look. She was staring at the horse the Amishman had tethered out to graze. Though food grew within reach all around, the animal stood without eating, motionless in the gray moonlight, head drooping almost to the ground. And even to Bobbi's eyes the mustang seemed nothing more than a small horse, almost runty, underfed and dead tired. Nothing more. No hint of the black sheen, the stubborn pride, the blaze of blue eyes.

Fiercely she whispered to Witchie, “That man must have trotted him all night and all day and half the night again. He's exhausted!”

Witchie nodded, putting a dry old hand to Bobbi's mouth to shush her. “I know,” she whispered much more quietly. “I can't expect any help from him.”

Witchie's braided hair shimmered silver in the moonlight, making a sort of halo on her head, almost as if she were someone holy. Her faded cotton house-dress no longer seemed dowdy, but merely soft, like the shadows, and old, like the hills. Crouched behind her concealing boulder, she sighed and laid her forehead against the globe of her cane for a moment, gathering herself. Then she lifted her head and laid her purse aside. She buttoned up her thin white cardigan sweater, a lacy old-woman's sweater, as if adjusting armor. She took up her walking stick in both hands and whispered to Bobbi, “Stay here.”

Witch Hazel Fenstermacher stood up and strode forward to combat the trickster. “Renegade!” she challenged. Her old voice resounded in the night like a throaty trumpet call.

Bissel slithered out from under the buggy and loomed to his feet, like a drab black shadow growing out of shadow.

“Apostate,” Witchie charged. “Traitor. Judas. You have broken faith with the Twelve, and grasped for power.”

Something shot red sparks, and Witchie cried out. Her cane flared, and in the white burst of light Bobbi saw the smith's upraised hammer. It might have been moving, but to her it looked motionless, towering, awesome. And the white fire of the pow-wow staff wavered, for Witchie was staggering. Then Witchie shouted, “Kabilde!” The staff's light blazed so brightly that even behind her rock Bobbi cowered, and in that white flame she saw—the snake, the serpent's head, cat-tawny and growing, growing, and darting and reaching toward Bissel, looming up in the light, and it was the trickster's turn to stagger back.

“Necromancer! Give the dark rider back his soul!” Witchie's voice sounded puissant and terrible in the night. She was a crone old as earth, holding a serpent the size of a python by the tail.

But Bissel had not lowered his hammer. Blood-red fire it flamed, forge fire, and it battered at Kabilde, and Kabilde flattened his hazel-yellow head and shrank back. For the first time the trickster spoke.

“Try to take it from me,” he said, and Bobbi glimpsed the glint of his grin in his beard, and his voice was more dangerous than Witchie's because it was darker. This man was the villain, all greed, his heart blacker than the night all around.

“Give the dark rider back his soul!”

“Just try to get it.”

And the black-handled hammer changed in Bissel's callused hands. It was the black staff, the death wand. And then Bobbi saw looming behind the Amishman his more true form, saw the long robes black as his heart, and she knew another of the trickster's many names. The warlock. A necromancer is one who deals in death. Witchie risked more than her power here. She risked her life—

Witchie attacked.

“By all the mysteries of the ancient Twelve!” she invoked in a strong voice. “By the three highest names!” And the white light redoubled, seeming to blaze as much from her stumpy body as from her staff, and the golden serpent Kabilde swelled taller than the scrub. Light and serpent beat against Bissel's power. But the black staff, the death wand, though it never moved, exuded an essence, a choking aroma, that they beat against in vain. It clouded like an umbra around Bissel, a black shadow that even the whitest of light could not penetrate, and Witchie could not seem to gain. Witchie would wear herself out, and then it would be the trickster's turn.

Bobbi found that her hands were clenched, her fingernails digging into her palms. Witchie had said, she, Bobbi, had powers. She had to do something; she couldn't just stay hidden and watch. Even though Witchie had told her to stay where she was. Even though she was scared.

At the edge of the battle Shane stood dully, taking little interest. Not even spooked, as any proper horse would be by the clamor, the weirdness, blaze brighter than any lightning, chilling scent of death in the air. Not Shane any longer, not even a mustang. Something—tamed. Something—castrated …

Shane!

Bobbi burst from her hiding place and ran to the horse, her back to Bissel—she didn't care any longer what he did to her. She could think only of Shane. Those blue eyes, so dim and clouded.… She had to save him. Facing the horse's head, she placed her hands one on each side of it, by those eyes. “Shane!” she begged.

Nothing happened. And if Bissel had been holding his hammer he would have blasted her by now. She didn't care.

In her mind she recalled a sweep of black hat brim over eyes that blazed with blue fire, so much unlike the hurtful, spiritless ones before her.… Thinking of that rider clothed in black, the man with a straight-browed face and broad shoulders under a black silk shirt, she laid her forehead against the black mustang's forehead and cried out, “Shane!”

Something exploded inside her closed eyes. Something exploded under her touch.

She sprawled to the ground, and Shane the black horse was rearing up over her, gigantic in the night, breaking his tether, springing forward, but not at her—he was charging, an embodied vengeance, straight at Bissel, and though he was black in the black night he shone, he gleamed in a way the shadowy villain he faced never could; he lustered like silk. Bissel gave a barking shout and stood with his hammer in hand again; he swung it. A bloom, a blood-red chrysanthemum of sparks spread at its sheening head, and even where she lay on the ground Bobbi felt the numbing shock, as if the smith had made her and the whole world his anvil to strike. Witchie shrieked. Kabilde writhed, convulsing. Shane's head plunged as if he had taken a slaughterhouse blow on his forehead. The horse crashed to his knees. Bobbi thought he would go down all the way and lie still, a mustang killed for dog meat, a body on the concrete floor. She wanted to help him somehow, but she had no strength, she could not move—

Except to cry out. “Shane!” she yelled.

And he was up again, lunging at his enemy, and Bissel's hammer was upraised again, this time close enough to strike with hard steel and a blacksmith's strength. But Kabilde was there, huge, his ivory-colored fangs fastened onto Bissel's arm, and Witchie was there, and Shane was rearing, striking out with iron-shod forehooves. And the hammer flew away into the blackness of night somewhere, and Bissel fell and lay still.

For a moment everything seemed to stop. Shane stood by the body. Witchie stood dwarfed by her own magic, awash in white light, holding a giant serpent. Bobbi stared, not comprehending very well why the red fire and the black smell of death were finally gone.

Then she struggled up and went to Shane, running her hands over him as if checking him for injuries, unbuckling the halter with its length of dangling tether from his head and hurling it away. He was puffing, his nostrils flared nearly into circles, but she could see he was more roused than exhausted now. He was Shane again, and he was all right. And when Bobbi looked around her, Kabilde was a carved walking stick again, Witchie was a spraddle-legged old woman again, her white light gone. Bobbi saw her by the light of the stars and the new moon.

The new moon holding the old moon in its arms, the bad omen. “It must have been for him,” Bobbi said to Witchie, pointing briefly at the moon and then at Bissel.

Lying at her feet, the man groaned. Bobbi jumped straight backward farther than she would have thought possible.

“He's not dead,” Witchie scoffed. “Land's sake, girl, it would take more than that to kill the trickster. We would never have got the better of him if we hadn't come on him in his sleep.”

“Good grief.” Bobbi stared at her, not wanting to believe it. The battle had been terrifying enough as it was.

“He would have changed shapes if he'd had time to gather himself.” For the moment, Witchie's voice had gone glassy dry, like Kabilde's. “He would have had some of his deceptions ready for us. As it was, all he could do was stand and fight.”

“I—I wish he was dead, but I'm glad Shane didn't kill him.”

“He has killed men for less,” said Witchie darkly. “But this one is for the Twelve to deal with.”

Shane swung around to face Bobbi and nuzzled her briefly. His nostrils were quieting. Bobbi's hand went to his forehead and rested there a moment. “You were awesome,” she said to him.

“Speak for yourself, girl,” grumbled Witchie. Bobbi ignored her.

“Where are you going to go now?” she asked Shane softly, knowing he would not answer her. “What are you going to do?”

Witch Hazel Fenstermacher stumped up and stood in front of her, peering at her. “The question is, girl,” she declared, “where are you going to go?”

“With him!” Her hand still lay on Shane's forehead. But at her words he tossed his head to shake it off.

“You can't stay with the dark rider for long,” Witchie said. “Nobody can. He comes into your life, and then out he goes again.”

“But I have to take his shoes off!”

“Shane can take care of himself. Always has.”

And I have to turn him back into a man, she was thinking. Whether he wants it or not. So he'll be safe. Or … maybe other reasons … She did not say what she was thinking. She said only, “The entanglement …”

“Them cards was laid a while ago. Things might have changed. Think, Bobbi. Think about yourself. Are you still so dead set against making your peace with your grandpap?”

She felt a storm of nameless, muddled feeling at the mention of her grandfather. Not hating, she knew that, as she knew Grant Yandro was not evil. Far from it. He had done nothing worse than say some hurtful words. But—but … There was something she could not get past.

“I can see you ain't ready.” Witchie looked around at the dimly moonlit night as if for a clue. “I wish I had the cards. Bobbi, think.”

Wearily Bobbi did. The sight of Samuel Bissel lying unconscious on the ground distracted her. She felt as if he was somehow going to get up and hurt her, and she didn't know where to go to get away from him. “There's nowhere,” she said. “There's nobody.”