The Witch with No Name

“The crabs are steadily moving inland,” the woman was saying, making an awkward jump as she almost stepped on something. “Apparently it’s happening up and down the coast as far north as Maine and as far south as lower Georgia.”

“Not Florida?” I wondered, stifling a shiver as Trent sat beside me.

“No one’s lived in Florida since the Turn. They probably haven’t checked yet.”

The newscaster handed it off to the station, which had somehow gotten an interview with a local marine biologist. “See what Inderland Entertainment Tonight is saying,” I asked, knowing their programming wouldn’t have to be cleared or verified either.

Trent turned the remote over to find the channel number. “IET isn’t on until six.”

“It’s six in Cincinnati,” I said, and he grunted, hesitated in thought, frowned, and clicked the right number. Yeah, I didn’t like that the sun was down on the East Coast either. Whatever was happening there would probably hit us in three hours.

“Inderland Entertainment Tonight,” he said, eyes fixed forward. “What do you think they will know that CNN doesn’t?”

“CNN is an hour late in breaking anything new,” I said, listening to the trendy, size 1 woman in six-inch zebra heels interviewing a beatnik college kid with wide eyes and too many friends in the background trying to get on TV. “Ghosts?” I said, turning to Trent. “Are they talking about ghosts?”

“I think we should try CNN,” he suggested.

“No, wait!” I said, grabbing for the remote, but he was too fast, jerking it away. “Go back!” I demanded, breathless until he did.

“He like came right at me!” the kid was saying. “Creepy as shit and ragged. I thought it was a joke until it grabbed me. I tried to get it off me, but I sort of went through it a little. My friends pulled it off me, and we got the hell out of there. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t even real except where it grabbed me!”

“It was a surface demon,” I said, pulse quickening.

Trent’s wandering attention snapped back. “No.”

But the skinny woman was talking, a still shot of an underground train platform behind her. “Reports of similar incidents have been coming in from all over Manhattan,” she said, and I wondered if she was going to change to more sinister makeup before the night was over. Maybe put a bat in her hair. “The first indications that this is a belowground-only assault seem untrue as the wraiths are beginning to venture above on the streets, causing havoc.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to grasp the concept of polite society when you’ve been out of it for a hundred years,” I said, grimacing as a blurry, shaky shot clearly taken from a phone showed a surface demon hissing at a car before diving behind the stone wall at Central Park.

“Those are surface demons!” Trent blurted out, sounding almost betrayed.

Great. Just great. Depressed, I unkinked my hands from around my knees and put my feet on the floor. “Damn it, Trent,” I complained. “I never would have played dead if I had thought they could actually do it!”

“But they can’t!” Trent’s gaze was fixed on the TV, his shock obvious.

Tired, I rubbed my forehead. “Maybe that’s what I felt. What we both felt,” I added, even though he hadn’t said anything about an elf-born curse ripping through his soul.

He jerked straight, and I could almost see the thoughts aligning. “I didn’t feel an attack. I felt a call to arms.” Hand rubbing over his face, he leaned back into the cushions, his brow lowering and his expression getting darker.

Subdued, I took the remote and set it on the table before it fell between the cushions. Elven magic had attacked me. It had passed over him and struck me—even if it hadn’t found what it needed to fully invoke. I had a bad feeling that whatever it had been, it had been aimed at the demons, not just the surface demons.

“You’re a demon,” Trent said softly, and I nodded, taking his hand in mine. “You’re in the collective.”

I’d felt an outcry, one so violent and explosive it had reached me even without a scrying mirror, knocking me flat on my ass. Depressed, I watched a group of people on a bus try to catch a surface demon only to have to beat it off a woman when it turned the tables on them.

“How did they manage it?” Trent said, distraught. “It can’t be done.”

But they did it. “Try the regular news now,” I said, and Trent let go of my hand to stretch for the remote.

“. . . new phenomena of what spellogists are calling a spontaneous release of surface demons from the ever-after. Elven Sa’hans are telling us these are actually the material manifestation of the souls of the undead and to leave them alone as they search for their bodies.”

Trent grimaced. “They are not Sa’hans. They’re frauds.”