Paint it Black, page 15
“Mrs. Armitage,” said the woman with a malicious leer, pulling her baton out of Alfie’s foot and thrust the tip at Gosha. “I’ve heard so much about you. You do not disappoint.”
Gosha reached out her hand—
“Tatlet.”
—and the switchblade flew into her palm. She curled her fingers around it, its heaviness a comforting weight, pointed the hilt toward the woman and clicked it open, the blade snapping out at her.
“I’m so happy to oblige.”
“I’d enjoy this immensely,” said the woman, “but not tonight.”
She slipped a hand into her overcoat, took out a card, and turned the image on it toward Gosha. The shifting pigments on its surface showed a head and torso sliced through with jagged metal cogs and wheels, the figure’s head thrown back in a silent howl.
And then Gosha found herself standing in the kitchen, Alfie shaking her.
“Gosha! Wake up!”
At first, her mind rejected the jump. She hadn’t lost consciousness, hadn’t emerged from a vision. Time had just skipped.
“What… What happened?”
“They did something to you. Another one of those cards. I found you wandering around like a zombie.”
Panic surged up within her, doing wonders to anchor her back into the present.
“The boys!”
He wrapped his arms around her, trying to soothe her.
“They’re okay. The ladies came. Elsie and her niece took the boys home. The others have gone after the thieves.”
She sagged into him, but her relief only lasted a second.
“Oh, no.” The intruders had free reign of the house. “The cards.”
She pushed herself out of Alfie’s embrace and raced up the stairs to the studio, but, to her relief, the wooden box containing her telling deck was where it had fallen at the foot of the bookshelves.
What else might they have taken?
She felt for her lipstick, but it was still taped to her arm.
Looking around the mess the intruders had left in her studio, she thought she accounted for everything Craft-related she had in there, but then remembered the single card she’d been carrying with her all day. It was upstairs on her bedside table. And the leader of the intruders had come into the studio from another part of the house.
Gosha pounded up the stairs to the bedroom, but the card was gone.
“BUGGER!”
Gosha returned to the kitchen to find Eleanor, Shreya, and Mei flittering around Alfie, poking and prodding him to see if he was all right. At the sight of her, they detached themselves and descended upon her in a buzz of concerned twittering, but she brushed them away and planted herself at the kitchen table to rummage through the pile of papers and magazines for the file from Waterford, Wakefield, Winston, and Whorl.
“They were from Dropnick.” She found the file at the bottom of the pile and sat back with relief. “They took one of my telling cards. What do you think they could do with it?”
“Who knows?” Shreya pulled up a chair next to her to continue Gosha’s examination. “Not one of us has any idea how he does any of his tricks.”
“Did you look at the remaining cards?” asked Eleanor. “Have they changed?”
Gosha felt like an idiot.
“I didn’t.”
She pushed away from the table.
“You sit,” said Eleanor. “I’ll get them.”
Gosha slumped back, happy to be looked after for a bit, but sat up, rigid, at the memory of the fourth intruder.
“The one in the living room!”
She ran from the kitchen, Alfie at her heels, and crunched across the fragments of shattered mirror to the tumble of furniture by the front windows, but the blanket lay flat on the floor. The intruder was gone.
“What a mess,” said Mei. “Everyone out so I can get this all cleaned up.”
She ushered them into the foyer and slammed the door.
“Bloody hell,” came her voice from beyond the door. “Stupid spells!”
“Wait,” said Gosha, only now realizing Agnieszka wasn’t around. That damned card really did a number on her. “Where’s my mother? Wasn’t she with you?”
“We split up,” said Shreya.
The doorbell rang and they all crowded round behind her as Gosha opened the door.
On the front step stood Gosha’s mother, still in her pink pajamas with the cat on the front. Her hair was tousled and her face flushed. At her knees cowered a battered, half-conscious young man with one swollen eye and a livid bruise darkening across his cheek. Agnieszka yanked him to his feet by the scruff of his neck.
“Got one.”
An evil grin spread across her face.
19
“What did you do to him?” said Gosha as her mother pushed the addled young man into the house.
Alfie and the ladies stood around, mouths agape. With all that happened during the night, this was one thing more than they could manage.
“The little bastard thought he could get the better of me. I learned a thing or two from the Communists.”
Agnieszka beamed with pride and clipped the young man up the back of his head with one hand. He flinched and whimpered.
“Where do we put him?”
“The dining room,” said Gosha, rushing ahead to pull out a chair for the young man.
Her mother pushed him into it and thrust her face close to his with a predatory smile. He tried to crane his head away as she touched him on the tip of his nose with one finger and muttered a spell.
Nothing happened.
“Lady damn him!” She looked around accusingly at Alfie and the assembled witches. “Why do my spells keep failing!”
“It must be the portents,” said Shreya. “Some of my most reliable recipes have failed recently. And it’s been getting worse.”
“You, too?” said Mei, brushing dust off her hands as she came in. “I think I got all the glass back in the mirror,” she said to Gosha. “You might want to run the hoover just in case. Ooh!” she saw the intruder for the first time. “Who do we have here?”
“This little turd,” Agnieszka, kicked the leg of her prisoner’s chair, “is going to tell us all about Doctor Dropnick and his plans for the Houses of Parliament.”
“Not with that concussion, he’s not,” said Mei, pulling out another dining chair so she could sit next to him and examine him closely. “Honestly, Agnieszka, you do love to throw your weight around.”
Mei took out a handkerchief from the pocket of her denim skirt, licked it, and dabbed at the swollen bruise over the young man’s eye.
“Don’t worry, dear. Mei will take care of you.”
He moaned as he tried to wriggle away.
“Hold still, boy.”
She slipped her hand in her pocket and drew it out again with her blue and white porcelain thimble on one finger, laid a hand on his head and whispered a spell. He moaned with relief as his eyes began to focus and the bruises on his face began to fade. His aura, the undefined aura of a normal person weakened because of the concussion, strengthened back to where it should be.
“There you go.” Mei rose and smiled at her success. “All ready for interrogation.”
The young man moved suddenly. With unexpected speed and strength he stood, reached for his baton, which was still in its holster strapped to his leg, grabbed Mei, and held the tip against her neck while all Gosha could do was wonder why no one had thought to disarm him.
“Get ba—”
Agnieszka, standing behind him and to one side, lashed out with a vicious punch to the back of the young man’s head, strong enough to daze him again and release Mei. She seized his arm and yanked it at an angle that made his shoulder pop loudly. He screamed as she pushed him back into the chair, took the baton from the floor where he dropped it, yanked it out from his battery belt by the wires, and tossed it on the dining table.
“I don’t need spells to bring a man to heel,” she said with disgust.
“And I just fixed him! Now we have to get that shoulder put back in,” said Mei, completely unfazed by being taken hostage. “That’s always such a hassle.”
“He has a box on him as well,” said Alfie. “And maybe some more cards. Be careful not to look at them.”
Mei opened the young man’s jacket, brushing his shoulder and making him wail with pain.
“Oh, hush,” she said as she rummaged through his pockets. “You’ll be fine.”
She pulled out a box identical to the one his boss had used.
“No extra cards. Shreya, love, help me with his shoulder.”
He struggled against them as Mei held him down in the chair and Shreya took his arm and pulled, but it didn’t stop them from popping his shoulder back in and making him shriek with the pain.
“Not much of a henchman, is he?” sniffed Agnieszka.
“Gosha, dear,” said Shreya. “Don’t you have a spell to make him talk to us?”
Gosha nodded and Shreya and Mei held him down to the chair by the arms.
“No, no, no,” he began to moan as Gosha crouched in front of him, and squirmed to get away from her, but the ladies held him fast.
Gosha placed a hand on his knee.
“Actalet.”
This was a spell she had forged with the help of Aloysius and Murgatroyd, the double-headed dragon that guarded the saint of Shadow’s tower in the Shadowlands. Gosha’s head throbbed as the spell created twinned openings within her and the young man, but the spell took and a puff of Influence flowed through, linking them together before the openings closed.
“Oh, God,” he whined, abject terror twisting his face. “Please help me!”
A pop and a crack came from the table, from the carved wooden box Mei had taken from his pocket. The ambient Influence around it began to boil and fizz as the witches watched, fascinated.
“What’s going on?” said Alfie, unable to see.
“Lady!” said Shreya, backing away from the young man. “Look!”
The young man’s aura began to effervesce as well, a powerful surge of energy in an aura not meant to sustain it.
“Alfie!” shouted Gosha. “Get out!”
He was the only other person in the room with an aura. Who knew if the box would do the same to him? She ran at him and pushed him into the foyer, slamming the door in his face.
“What’s happening?” he shouted from the other side.
The boiling Influence rose off the young man and the box, turning into a swarm of beating wings. All five witches in the room had seen what those wings could do to a person. As one, they bolted from the room.
“Help me!’ shouted the young man, staggering after them.
Eleanor, last out, pulled the door shut behind her and locked it with a spell. The young man hammered at the door, screaming desperately for help.
“What’s happening?” asked Alfie. “Can you do anything?”
The fathom’s bane in Gosha’s field kit was used up, but she might have some up in the studio. She turned and legged it up the stairs, huffing and puffing as she burst into the room, and nearly tripped over the debris left by the intruders. The supplies for her field kit she kept locked in a filing cabinet next to her photo archive.
“Heckatisk,” she said with one hand on the drawer handle, but the spell failed. “HECKATISK!”
The drawer clicked open. In a small cardboard box in the back was one half-full phial of fathom’s bane. She snatched it out and ran for the stairs, but as she made it to the floor below, she heard a scream she knew all too well. The scream rose in pitch and desperation, only to suddenly cut short as she reached the dining room and the other witches standing outside. She was too late. The corruption of the young man’s aura had grown so great, it had poisoned the flow between the real world and the turbulent storm in the Between that was the realm of the Lords and Ladies of Influence. They had plucked him from existence to protect themselves.
She knew what she’d find when Eleanor unlocked the door for her and she peered into the room through the cracked opening. Nothing. The young man was gone, the only sign he’d ever been there the overturned chair, the baton, and the carved wood and brass box on the table. The Influence around the box no longer boiled, but the dining room was still filled with fluttering wings. She pulled the door shut.
“What happened to him?” asked Alfie.
Shreya and Mei had been with her at Paddington Station when the moth phantom emerged and consumed the auras of the acolytes investigating the catastrophic side effects of one of Dropnick’s experiments. They’d seen the moth consume the life force of a dozen people, reducing them to dried, withered husks, but only Alfie had seen the effects of a person being rendered from the universe, crushed and consumed by a bloom of darkness.
“The same thing that had happened to Neil Kirby.”
Neil Kirby, the son of Alfie’s mentor, a kid he’d known since childhood who took too much of the wrong drug, an elixir concocted by Vivien Drake in her attempt to seize the sainthood of Shadow from Pauline Sutton under the guidance, Gosha now knew, of Dropnick.
Alfie turned pale.
“Hell,” he whispered.
The other witches had heard the story from Gosha and exchanged appalled looks.
“You all heard the crack, yes?” said Agnieszka. “The box knew you cast a spell to make him talk. It was only then that it spewed out its foul corruption. The little doctor took precautions in case his hoodlums failed him.”
“Monster,” said Mei.
If I hadn’t cast the spell, he’d still be alive.
She quashed the thought before it could take root. That chain of responsibility stretched all the way back to the day the young man first threw in with Dropnick. She wasn’t about to wrap the chain around herself and assume its burden.
Well, perhaps a few links.
“The corruption’s still in there.” She held up the phial of fathom’s bane. “I have enough of this to clear it, but I need the windows open. Can one of you take care of them from the outside?”
“I’ll do it,” said Mei.
“Call out as soon as you do, then get out of the way.”
Mei nodded and padded out through the front door to the top of the steps to give herself a good angle to take care of the windows.
“Ready,” she called out.
Gosha turned the doorknob.
“Go!”
The large bay windows rumbled and rattled as whatever spell Mei cast lifted them up. Gosha pushed into the room and slammed the door behind her. The fluttering wings were everywhere. Either Dropnick made his device with his usual negligence for consequences, or he fully intended it to do as much damage to everyone around it as possible. She sprayed her small remaining amount of fathom’s bane into the air, praying it would be enough. The fluttering wings froze in place, the effect spreading throughout the entire room.
“Collusetoire.”
The spell shot through her with brisk force, and an abrupt wind blasted the corrupted Influence out the windows, clearing the room.
“Ah!” cried Mei’s outside in shock.
Gosha opened the door.
“It’s okay to come in now.”
The others crowded in, sticking to the edge of the room even though the danger had passed, as Gosha closed the windows to shut out the cold night. Alfie righted the upturned chair. The witches peered at the box on the table from afar, too scared to approach it further.
“Nobody cast any spells,” said Shreya, “In case it can still do something.”
“We need to take that thing apart.” Mei crouched to look at the box from the edge of the table at eye level. “If he’s coming for us, we need to know how his toys work. Perhaps it can give us insight into his pet monster and how he intends to use it.”
The witches all looked expectantly to Gosha for her response. The unspoken rules between witches were very clear. This happened in Gosha’s house to Gosha and her family. It was up to her to call the shots.
“Yes. Do it.”
It might be Gosha’s place to take the lead, but organizing was Shreya’s domain. She was its queen and everyone knew it. All attention turned to her.
“Mei,” she said, confident as if she had been planning this since the moment she had got the call from Agnieszka that they were in trouble, “we need to be sure it’s safe to poke and prod that thing. Can you devise us a way to protect ourselves if it goes off?”
Mei nodded, eyes flickering as her mind ticked over. “Agnieszka, I’ll need to raid your greenhouse.”
“Yes, yes,” said Gosha’s mother. “Anything you need.”
They scuttled off together to the garden.
Shreya turned to Eleanor. “We need a way to test the box to see if it’s booby-trapped.”
“Something low power,” said Eleanor, running her thumb along the edge of her jaw as she thought, “but with unmistakable intent. Gosha, may I use your pantry?”
“Of course. You know where the key is.”
Eleanor darted off. Gosha had yet to get used to her aged appearance, even though the woman under that gray hair was still as vibrant as she had been before giving up her immortal youth.
Shreya took out her belan talisman from the belt of her sari and held the thin traditional Indian rolling pin delicately between her fingers over the table as if it were a conductor’s baton.
“I don’t think it will present us with any more trouble, but we have to be safe. And any precautions Mei can come up with will help us once we start tinkering under the hood of that thing.”
“I wish Elsie were here,” said Gosha.
“Yes, but she has her hands full with the boys, and she needs to be with Margie until sunrise. Not to worry. Between the five of us, we have at least five hundred years of experience. Eleanor does wonders for our odds. What I need from you is a reliable form of analysis. Are your widow’s weeds showing you anything?”
