The Witch with No Name

“Hot damn!” I exclaimed, spinning to Al. My lips parted. His eyes were closed, and his jaw was clenched as if expecting to be whipped. “Al?” I whispered, and they opened. Slowly his tension eased, and he exhaled, fingers shaking as he hid his hands behind his back.

“There, you see?” he said confidently, but what I’d seen was his fear. “Typical elven sloppiness. Rachel, if you are ever that careless, I’ll strangle you with your own charm.”

“Al . . .” I touched his shoulder and he jerked away. This was why he was here, not to show me the flaw in the elven curse. He’d been afraid, and I was the one he’d come to. “You weren’t sure if you could stay,” I said, and his eyes flicked to mine.

“What? Nonsense,” he grumbled, taking his circle down with an unnecessary wave of his hand. “The elves haven’t crafted a decent curse in three thousand years. Pull up your second sight,” he said, grimacing at empty space. “What a nasty piece of work. I was never for their creation in the first place, but you do have to admire the pure savagery of it all.”

He’d once told me demons had created vampires, which would in turn mean they’d created surface demons, and feeling uneasy, I pulled up my second sight. It wasn’t hard to do, but I didn’t do it often, not liking the red-smeared, gritty vision overlaid on the green of reality.

Sure enough, the surface demon was there among the sparse grass and sunbaked dirt that existed this far out from the city center. It howled soundlessly at the sun, clearly not happy to have been forced back. Hissing, it turned to Al and myself, and I dropped my second sight to become invisible to it. “Holy crap on Velveeta toast,” I whispered, shaken as I imagined this happening everywhere as the sun slowly crept across the surface of the world.

“Just so,” Al said, a hint of what might be sympathy in his voice. Shaking, I felt my way around the table to settle in the second wire chair. There were going to be lots of unhappy vampires. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to get to muck out the church with Jenks and Ivy today. This was bad. If the vampires had been ticked at me before, they’d be doubly so now, blaming me for the elven failure since Landon had set me up to take it.

“That is what happens when you try to tweak a well-crafted curse,” Al said, flipping his hat. “It’s always better to start from scratch than mend flaws created by a modification.”

“What about the vampires who found their souls last night?” I asked.

“They are soulless again,” he said, attention distant as he flipped his hat to land squarely on his head. “The long undead will be most unhappy that their headlong rush to their demise has been interrupted. I predict that by noon, the elves will be spelling to bring their souls back again. They want the old undead gone, and this is the easiest way to do it.” He set his hat on the table between us. “But you already knew that,” he said, voice low. “Killing them with a kindness. Perhaps elves are more like us than they wish to admit . . .”

I rubbed my forehead. The sun was barely up and I was tired already. I needed to call Ivy. “This isn’t my problem.”

“Of course not.” Al stood and brushed at his coat, watching the way the sun hit the fibers. “There’s a way to save them, the undead I mean.”

I looked up, hesitating when I realized some of the threads in his suit sparkled. “How?”

He twirled his hat, running it down his arm, across his back, and down to his free hand where he caught it and jauntily placed it on his head. “If you break the path between the two worlds—”

“I’m not going to destroy the ever-after. It will be the end of all magic,” I interrupted.

“Why not?” He eyed me speculatively. “You’ve seen Cincinnati without her undead. You can end it all right here. Break the lines and no one goes in or out. You might learn to like living without magic. It may be the only way to survive us coming home.”

He meant the demons, and my arm dropped, chilled against the cold metal. “Why are you concerned about Cincinnati or the vampires?”

“I’m not. I simply don’t want to go back.” He turned to me. “Ever.”

If he was proposing an end to magic, it was a good bet he had a way to fix it. “Then maybe you should try playing by our rules.”

“Maybe we already are,” he shot back.

“Right.” Mistrusting this, I leaned back in my chair, tugging my robe closed when it threatened to fall open. “So I break the lines to keep surface demons out and you here. Everyone is mad at me.” I hesitated as he beamed at me. “Except the demons, who set themselves up as king.”

“That’s about it.”

“You do it. I don’t have time to learn a new life skill,” I said, and he put a hand atop the table, leaning over me with his breath smelling of Brimstone.

“You are the only one with mystics in her.” He took a breath. “Rachel.”

I put a finger on his chest and backed him up. “So now mystics are a good thing?”

“Does it feel like a good thing?”