Night of the Witch-Hunter, page 11
And there it was:
“Nathaniel.”
Then, she understood. With that understanding came a realization that a part of her had perhaps known the whole while. After all, hadn’t there been something in the eyes and chin, the slope of the ears of the witch-hunter that’d seemed strangely familiar to her? The monstrous eyes and lips were a distraction from his more subtler traits. Certainly there was some inflection in his speech that stirred up feelings of déjà vu?
It was him. Goodman Pryce, the witch-hunter, was the father of your child. He’s my ancestor too. You and him both.
The witch’s silence—in both past and present—served as confirmation enough. And with that confirmation, that the witch-hunter was the father of Rebecca Wesley’s child, Josey found she’d regained control of her body and her burgeoning powers. She recalled the mystical energy holding Nikki, releasing the girl to pull her wounded hands against her body and rock back and forth on the floor.
Before Josey could offer apologies, she knew what message she had to send back through the fog of time.
I love her, yes. Yes, I do. I love her. And I don’t think she’ll betray me. Not the way Pryce betrayed you.
But you can’t be sure! There was Rebecca, the first witch of Fallen Church—though not the first mortal in the village to dabble in black magic—finding her voice again.
It’s never about being sure though, Josey shared across time. It’s about believing. Believing there’s still something good. Giving yourself over to that belief.
Josey opened her eyes and found Nikki standing before her, holding out her injured hands, as if presenting them for inspection. The small smile on the other girl’s face, the way she reached across with one of those injured hands and brushed strands of Josey’s dark hair away, told Fallen Church’s newest witch that her words were not only heard and felt by her ancestor but had also reached the other survivors in the art room.
Josey took Nikki’s hands and brought them to her mouth, holding them just shy of her lips.
A gasp sounded across the room, drawing the attention of both girls. DiDi was on the floor. She seemed free, at last, of supernatural manipulation, in control of her body once more. However, she wasn’t clear of the danger just yet.
Ms. Roberts had the gun.
“DiDi!” Nikki cried out and made a move toward her sister.
This time, Josey wouldn’t use her powers or physical action to stop her friend. She opted to rely on her words and trusted that her friend would still be willing to listen.
“Wait,” she said.
There was hesitation. And it was enough to keep Nikki at her side. This same hesitation was mirrored by their history teacher keeping her finger off the trigger and holding the barrel down, away from DiDi.
“I heard a voice inside my head. We all did. The Man. The Hunter. Told me to kill you. Told me you were all witches.”
“Ms. Roberts,” Josey started, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. . .”
“He’s calling again. Singing his sweet little song. But I know what that song is now. It’s the Devil’s song. . .”
Later, Josey might try to convince herself that Rebecca had, once again, reached forward from the past to stop her descendant from intervening. But Josey would know the truth, a truth she’d have to live with for the rest of her life: it was her choice and her choice alone to keep her hands by her side, her powers in check.
She refrained long enough for Ms. Roberts to take the gun and turn it on herself. Barrel under her chin, trigger pulled, brains splattered against the door. Like a deflated balloon, her body slithered to the ground, a hissing accompanying her fall.
After DiDi scrambled back, away from the dead body, joining the other young women, the trio embraced. They worked together to ensure each member of the party stood on their own two feet despite the terrible weight of all that’d transpired that evening.
Despite the immediate danger ending, they couldn’t miss the sounds of marching feet, of murmuring voices that repeated the witch-hunter’s adopted chorus. “Witch bitch, witch bitch, witch bitch. . .”
It seemed the witch-hunter was enacting his endgame.
Josey surveyed the room, taking in the damaged walls riddled with stray bullet holes, the broken window, and the bloodied bodies of their teachers. However, the painted symbols were still intact, the salt circle was still more or less undisturbed, and the Rebecca-vetted spell book pages were ready for recitation.
She knew what came next, as sure as she’d known anything in her life. And, just as confessing her love for Nikki after all those years of longing, that surety felt good. It demanded action.
Lucky for Josey, the Farr sisters looked to her for answers. And she had them to share.
“Time for us witch bitches to send this asshole back to the dusty past where he belongs.”
As words were spoken, the art room, the school, and the entire town of Fallen Church plunged into the darkness.
Goodman Pryce cursed himself for trusting a woman, even one like the so-called teacher of history who’d expressed as much faith as he might have hoped for among his throng of followers. Controlling her until the moment when the new witch, Rebecca’s descendant and, yes, his as well, had unleashed a surge of power, freeing the crone from the witch-hunter’s control. Freeing her long enough for the damage to be done.
Look what she did. Killed herself. Weak, stupid woman. Not a hunter. Not like me.
Pryce was thankful that he’d made backup plans. Before they’d made it to the school grounds, he’d spoken to the townsfolk under his control.
They’d stared at him in slack-jawed wonder. Their dull faces made the witch-hunter shudder, as he considered what fate might lie ahead for himself and the people his Fallen Church if these simple sinners were to be their legacy.
“Tell me the prophecies,” he’d commanded. “Tell me what will happen at the turn of the millennium. This Y. . . 2. . . K.”
The answer, from someone with an officious face and a tailored suit to match, came in a clipped and canned fashion as if the man spoke by reciting a spell, the same as the witches no doubt hoped to do inside the school building.
“Don’t worry about that, pal. We’ve been running tests. Making sure all our systems operate the way they’re supposed to, even when the clocks change at midnight. The worst thing that might happen is rolling blackouts. But nothing permanent.”
Pryce seized on the words, finding a way to direct them toward his ends.
“Blackout,” he said. “So we could stop this. . . power? Take away the lights?”
“Yeah, but, we won’t have to. . .”
“Do it.” Pryce’s command provided no opportunity for objection or protest. He stood with hands on hips, sneer on face, waiting until some of the men broke away from the crowd, setting themselves up to complete the witch-hunter’s special mission.
Later, when Pryce ordered his followers to break into the school and finish the work the now-dead history teacher had started, he’d watched wide-eyed as the false lights blinked quickly—once, twice—and then went out. Not just in the school, but in the tall, arched poles holding their false suns. In the blink of an eye, they no longer illuminated the paths. The houses and storefronts and every building nearby, all went black.
“Let there be darkness,” he said with an amused chuckle, enjoying the twist on that all-too-common Biblical command.
The witch-hunter’s followers acted as his vanguard, smashing at the glass and steel façade of the school building. Many were already cut, burned, and bleeding from previous encounters. All of them were worn-down, bone-tired. The exhaustion on their faces reminded Pryce of the people living back in his Fallen Church. Fighting the land, the elements, each other, everyone doing everything they could to survive.
It was easy to manipulate people that worn and weary, desperate for answers and seeking someone to blame even if they hadn’t quite known that yet. Perhaps this Fallen Church is not so different than the one I left behind.
He pointed at posters and glass cases containing golden statuary, signaling to his followers that these idols and heathenistic illuminated manuscripts were to be destroyed. Coming across a library, its stocked shelves full of books without a Bible among their number, Pryce encouraged others in his flock to set those tomes aflame. The sound of burning paper and the pop of melted binding glue was music to the witch-hunter’s ears.
However, his nose picked up something beyond ink-scented smoke. He breathed in deeply, filling his lungs with the scent of witch.
He didn’t have to search for long. Not Nathaniel Pryce the witch-hunter, would-be hero of Fallen Church. He knew his hunt would soon end.
And yet. . .
Something nibbled at Pryce’s thoughts. Its persistence reminding him of a barnyard cat toying with a captured mouse. How he hated those whiskered beasts!
With that vague sense of danger in mind, Pryce commanded his followers to go ahead. He’d let violence serve as angel’s trumpets announcing his arrival to the coven.
Nikki struck her lighter, and its flame flickered, before burning steady. Her thumb pressed the red plastic fork, ensuring the flame and its light both stayed alive. With her other hand, she shoved a copy of the spell into Josey’s hands. She kept a copy for herself. There was a third copy, one she tried to give to her sister.
But DiDi, her face yellowing and purpling with fresh bruises, her eyes visible through puffy slits care of the pummeling she’d received, refused. Instead, she gestured, first to the door, already buckling under the strain of attackers hellbent on breaking into the art room, and then to the open window, with room for trespassers left despite the presence of Mundy’s corpse. DiDi had the gun and had also broken off part of a painter’s easel, crafting a crude cudgel from it, paint-splattered and notched up and down its length.
“Whatever’s going on there, you don’t need me for that. I’m gonna do what Mama would’ve wanted, try and keep you safe and outta trouble,” she said.
Josey found herself blinking away tears, and it wasn’t even her family member who was speaking. When she looked at Nikki, her friend was wiping her eyes with the spell book pages, while keeping the lighter’s flame going in her other hand.
“Thank you,” Josey said to DiDi.
Following her statement, the thick wooden door finally buckled under the pressure, sending tan-colored splinters of treated wood flying around the art space.
DiDi laughed. “Don’t thank me yet,” she told her sister’s friend. “Once I’m gone, you’re the one who’s gonna have to look after her next.”
Nikki’s light flickered, blinking out for a second. She winced before the flint was struck and the flame reappeared.
“You okay?” Josey asked.
Nikki nodded. “It’s only a little pain,” she said. “We’ve had worse.”
“He’s coming,” Rebecca spoke through Josey.
In unison, Josey, Nikki, and even DiDi replied. “We know!”
The first wave of intruders trampled across the broken door. DiDi pulled the trigger, testing the gun for more bullets, seeing what might remain in its clip.
Fate smiled down on her. The white and gold-embroidered top of a band uniform worn by the first person through the doorway blossomed red, like she’d given the attacker a boutonniere for prom.
Glimpsing this from the corner of her eye, Josey had no time to see if the person shot had been her baby brother. There was no time left, no time to save individuals one by one. She knew the spell-working that she had to do. A true spell. Josey and Nikki would perform part of the ceremony on one end, while Rebecca did her thing in the past.
Josey began by invoking the necessary goddesses. “Hecate, Diana, Lilith, Persephone, hear the pleas of your servants. . .”
Standing in the salt circle, close enough so their heads touched, Josey and Nikki read through their portion of the ritual, performing the necessary hand gestures and providing offerings via objects found in their pockets or scavenged from the classroom.
“. . . sands of time, ascend the hourglass confines. . .”
DiDi’s grunts and screams, the click of her now-emptied clip, and the smack of hot metal and cold, paint-splattered wood against the flesh of her attackers covered the sounds of the ritual.
Josey caught Nikki’s eyes drifting and saw the tiny flame quivering. She cleared her throat, trying to draw her friend’s attention back, trying not to interrupt the ceremony, but also wanting to get her message across.
“You can go if you want to. . . I can finish this,” she whispered
None of that was necessary, however. After the ordinary citizens of Fallen Church, all of them caught up in the frenzied excitement of the witch-hunter’s commandments, fell or retreated under DiDi’s assault, the rapid-fire pop-pop-pop of multiple handguns being fired at once, marked the arrival of the Fallen Church police department.
DiDi’s last words came as a defiant snort and a scream of “Pigs!”
Nikki fell to her knees. The lighter slipped from her grasp and all returned to darkness with flickering after-images.
Josey wanted to join her friend on the floor. She wished she could pull the other girl into an embrace that’d take them both to the grave.
But she couldn’t do it. She knew that. The town of Fallen Church might not have always loved her. But it was the only home she’d known. In this way, Josey felt like she finally understood why her ancestor chose to hide in the woods on the outskirts of her village, rather than running away and finding somewhere new to start her life again.
Like her ancestor, Josey knew she’d rather fight and fix the resulting problems later than surrender and let her immediate problems win.
So she’d remained standing, holding the spell book pages close to her eyes and trying her damnedest to read them in the dark. She didn’t turn around when the gasping, breathy croaks of the police officers-turned-deputy-witch-hunters commanded her to “Put her hands up!” or “Turn around!” or “Get on the ground!”
One officer even went so far as to tell Josey, “Don’t make me hurt you.”
That last line was the equivalent of a mosquito’s whine on the last day of summer. In response, Josey made a quick, flippant gesture with her free hand, borrowing a portion of the power she was using to open a portal across space-time. She flung a spectral ball of conjured light back in the face of the offending officer.
With a flash and bang, the ball exploding in the face of the lawman cast a white light across the room. Almost too white, too bright.
“Enough!”
There he was. It was only at the sound of his voice that Josey finally turned from her spell work.
Pryce regarded her with the cruel smile, one that had grown so familiar to her. His bulbous eyes were bloodshot, while his hands glowed red. He opened one hand like someone’s father playing catch. Except there was no seamed, dust-covered baseball released from his palm, but rather more crimson-tinged lightning, traveling sideways across the room, hitting the paper in Josey’s hand and setting the spell ablaze.
“You don’t win,” Pryce said; and Josey was uncertain if he spoke to her or to Rebecca back in the past, a past she found was coming into sharper and sharper focus. “I’ve seen this future and there are no witches here. I win.”
But Josey wouldn’t let that stop her. She continued chanting, performing as much of the ritual as she could remember. Her fingers ran through Nikki’s hair as the girl she loved pressed her body against the leg of the new witch from Fallen Church. Nikki’s lips moved in time with Josey’s, no sound emerging but the effort, some effort was made.
When Pryce threw out another bolt of energy aimed at Nikki’s head, Josey countered, waving her arms, producing a blue-tinged force field around both their bodies.
“Did you not hear me?” Pryce screamed, clearly displeased with being ignored. “I said ‘I win.’ You, witch bitch.”
Defiant, finished with tolerating abuse and slander, Josey gave the witch-hunter an answer—whether he wanted to hear it or not. “What about the statues?” she asked.
Her question stopped his ranting.
Finding him stunned, she pressed forward.
“There are no statues of you. There are statues of Rebecca. There are performances focused on her. We sell children’s books and tell the next generation of Fallen Church about her life before they go to bed. There’s nothing like that for you.”
Sensing a renewed attack, Josey ducked and pushed Nikki flat against the floor. As suspected, Pryce used his powers to lift a table and hurl it across the art room. The table struck the ground and blew apart.
Josey popped back up, confronting the witch-hunter. Now it was her turn to smile. “You’re a footnote. Another man who tried to control a woman, only to make her immortal and leave himself a fading memory.”
The witch-hunter raised his blunderbuss and pulled the trigger. Again, Josey was ready. Using her powers, she stopped the shot mid-air and sent the pellets back full-force at Pryce. The cloud caught him in the chest, blowing through chunks of thick black clothing and the skin and bone beneath that.
Pryce tossed aside his weapon and shouted for the police officers to open fire. Josey waved her hands, increasing the strength of the protective shielding, pulling it across not only herself and Nikki, but also the injured townspeople scattered across the room.
The witch-hunter drew his cutlass. With his chest a bloody mess, he gave his best war cry and charged at the girls. Josey stood her ground and watched his approach. She knew she had to time everything just right and hoped she’d be able to pull it off.
Arms raised, two-handing the sword as he prepared to bring it down on the supernatural shield, Pryce swung with all his might. In the split second before the blade fell, Josey removed the force-field, catching the witch-hunter by surprise.
His blade fell and Josey’s bare hands were there to catch it. The edge of the cutlass dug deep into her flesh, making wounds that would no doubt leave scars. She grunted. But she would not falter, she would not be moved.
