50+ Ways to Annoy the Death Witch: Chapter 5
Chapter 5: [this space intentionally left blank]
It probably took me a full 15 minutes for me to realize that I was arguing with a goddamn illusion.
I was so busy trying to keep her occupied so Tabitha could do her work, that I didn’t notice she wasn’t real. And she definitely had to know we were there, at this point, our conversation got heated. I was trying to be mindful of the neighbors, but if someone was in the house, they were very likely aware of my presence.
Either way, the gig was up, so I swatted the illusion.
That probably sounds weird, but the illusion just dies if you do something that shows you know it’s not real. Putting your hand through it usually works. So I just swatted it, like there was an insect.
Door wasn’t even open. Why would it be? Of course it wasn’t open. Still, I was put out.
(I just spent fifteen minutes arguing with a damned door.)
Someone else had been doing some preparations this afternoon, as well, it would seem.
Well. Shit a brick. I dug my phone out to call Tabby. Tabitha.
She sounded kinda breathless when she answered. “Hey,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”
Which was a very strange thing for her to say. Something odd about the way she was talking, too. Almost. Purring? I put all my focus on her, pulling on my own magic. I don’t talk to her on the phone overmuch, but this wrong. “You alright? You sound out of breath.”
“Yeah, I just been waiting for a few minutes. I’m worried about the storm coming, is all.”
Hm. That was an honest thing the person on the phone was telling me.
It was also something I don’t believe has ever once come out of Tabitha Greene’s mouth. Definitely she’s never said anything like that in earshot of me, I can tell you that for nothin. She’s scared of some things, whether she’ll admit it or not, but weather is not on that particular list.
This woman, this witch we’re dealing with, she is astounding at illusions. I know it sounds a little bit like I’m trying to excuse me missing the finer details of arguing with an illusion, but even maintaining one for that long is impressive, however skilled the portrayal. She’s probably usually good at imitating strangers well enough, she’s got the accent right. But she was talking to me incorrectly.
“They say it’s gonna be a bad storm, and the wind’s pickin up. Adam, I’m scared.”
You asked her my first name, and I’m not convinced she knows I have one. “Well, you hold tight, sugar,” I said, because I’m not an idiot. “This old pickup, you know she don’t always turn over first try, but I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Okay, just hurry,” she said.
I hung up and shoved my phone in my pocket. If there had been any doubt, that sealed it. The engine is brand new, and doesn’t give me any trouble. Also, if I ever called Tabitha sugar, I imagine she would bite me in real life, phone or no.
Her ass could wait til I was ready to deal with her.
Now, Miss Tabitha’d mentioned a hide a key earlier, she said she’d noticed it in the dead flower bed, and sure enough, there it was.
Woman’s got an alarm system with several cameras, and she’s got a spare key in a plastic rock anybody with eyes standing on the porch can see.
(I suppose I should admit in defense of this lady, I certainly wouldn’t have known about it if Tabitha hadn’t mentioned seeing it. She’s good at picking up on the details I miss, it’s one of the reasons I like working with her so much. We fill in each other’s gaps.)
Except, I realized, the dang doorbell camera wasn’t even plugged in or anything. It was velcroed to the doorway, and when I pulled it off, didn’t have any batteries in it, or nothing.
We just midjudged the whole thing. She isn’t using tech to monitor the property, she’s using magic entire, and using tech and being obnoxious to keep everybody out of her business.
We were being careful about the wrong things.
I hate getting shit wrong, and I know Tabitha does, too. Maybe more than I do.
I was getting a little bit worried about her, as I unlocked the front door, because it occurred to me that the woman had Miss Tabitha’s phone.
Tabitha Greene is also not a woman inclined much to silence, if there had been a confrontation and I hadn’t heard anything? That was… that was worrying. She wasn’t the kind to go down without a fight.
As soon as I got into the house, past the unknown witch’s wards, I started looking with magic. There was someone alive, down underneath the house, somehow. No magic down there that I could feel, which was concerning, but-
Lord, don’t let Tabby be dead.
I spent much too long searching the house for a storm cellar entrance or a basement door before I went out back and found one in the yard.
I was just chewing time up, chewing it up and I couldn’t help but think that Tabby was somewhere hurt, because she would absolutely not be this quiet for this long if she weren’t, sick or hurt or-
She was not dead.
She could not be dead.
The cellar doors weren’t even locked, and I threw em open, and threw witchlight down ahead of me. Didn’t do much more than a little tea light, but I could make lots of em, and they were cheap in power.
There was a pretty normal old-school storm cellar with shelves, and someone had yanked the back wall out to lead under the house. Right up to what looked like the bottom of the foundation, which was a different kind of worrying.
Shit, if she was an earth witch, that explained the nonsense at the graveyard. I’ve been thinking that it was almost like something reflected all the death magic back into the dead things. Which is kind of possible to do, if you surround a body with certain magically reflective materials.
No, not salt, salt is more or less magically inert. It’s everywhere, it’s in people’s bodies and skin, if it interefered with magic, it would fuck up every spell ever cast. Something like quartz sand would work really well. But you have to surround the dead thing on all sides with it, and probably do something to the sand to make sure it only reflected the kind of magic you wanted it to reflect, and let everything else through. And you’d have to be able to work it into the ground without seeming to disturb it.
An earth witch could do all that.
And that’s why there was nothing there.
It had all crawled away.
Gave me the goddamn spooks.
And that awful red mouth in the wall of the cellar, knowing there was more.
I don’t have a problem with being underground much, but in a random tunnel some crazy lady dug under her heavy ass mid 70s house with a foundation that had clearly seen better days?
Tabitha wasn’t afraid of much, but I bet this gave her the willies.
(If she was alive when she- stop that.)
There was someone alive, I knew that much. And they were hurting. It didn’t feel like her, like her magic, but it was someone I could help, who might be able to tell me more.
There was a turn and another turn and then Tabby’s head was sitting on the goddamn ground, blood on her neck. Eyes open wide, mouth open wide, staring in horror into the dark.
I just about fainted. I’m man enough to admit that. I about delaminated right then and there.
Not Tabby.
She turned her head, slightly, and I could see her eyes move. And if I listened to the noise above my heart pounding in my ears, I heard her breathing wheezily.
The red at her neck was some kind of ribbon, I realized, not blood-
Her magic. Her magic was gone.
I dropped down and pulled the binding ribbon off her neck. Wasn’t even real ribbon, it was that plastic balloon shit. Barely a real binding- anybody could take it off- but a real binding takes weeks and weeks to make. This was a thrown together magic binder and syphon, which is why I wasn’t picking up any of her magic.
I burned it in my hand (burnt my hand a little oops) and put my hand on her cheek, trying to reassure her. Her skin felt cold and clammy, but I could feel her moving. She was alive, she was alive, she was just buried up to her neck in hard earth and having a real bad time about it, for completely understandable reasons.
“I’m gonna get you out of this, okay? You’re gonna be alright.” I tried to sound reassuring, but to me I just sounded scared.
“Okay,” she said, her voice a breath more than a word.
That’s about when I noticed the dead bodies. Two of them, both digging at the walls. “Do I need to worry about them?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” One of them turned to look at me and very deliberately shook its head, and then turned back to its work. Grandpa, I think, he was better preserved than Grandma, although they’d only died about a year apart, I thought.
Maybe she’d wanted a natural burial? She did have Sight, maybe she Saw this and decided-
Hell with it, not my problem. “Tabby-cat, are your arms down by your sides?”
“No,” she said. There were tears trickling down her face.
“Okay.”
I tell you something, she and I have been in a pickle once or twice, and I’d seen her good and scared (whether she’d admit it or not) but she’s incredibly tough, she’s very good at taking it on the chin and keepin on no matter how scared she is. She’s the toughest person I know, and one of the strongest witches I’ve ever met.
And she was damned near catatonic.
I didn’t actually know what to do, but she very clearly was not functional, so it had to be me. And I had to get her out of here before that lady realized I was missing, and came looking for me.
The dirt was hard, compact, like it hadn’t been turned recently.
There were sigils in the floor. White dust. I bent down to mar them, but they were baked in- she’d sent the white dust down into the ground deeper. “Okay,” I said. “Alright.” Most of them were protective- the sigils kept noise from escaping, and kept the zombies under her control.
We were running out of time. We had to be.
“You have to leave,” she said.
“What? Absolutely not.”
“She’ll just get us both.”
“Under no circumstances,” I replied. I was casting about, feeling for sources of magic. Hers, slowly trickling in. And two more.
I looked at the zombies. “She didn’t- did- Tabitha did she put those people back in their corpses?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was dull.
My mind spun as I thought. If she was digging this deep, with this much magic, she was looking in places an elderly woman was just not going to be able to do without people noticing. Like, this would require some equipment, which is not how you hide secret money.
Unless someone in the household was an earth witch. Then looking under the house like this made sense. The kids said that her grandma found a realtor, maybe she found someone in the know, who’d sell to a fellow witch.
Not the worst idea, it’s one of the reasons Tabby’s been dragging her feet on selling her Dad’s house, I bet. She’d have to rip out all the magic her grandparents put in place to protect it, you couldn’t just leave it for someone else.
(Well, you could, but you’d be an asshole, and usually someone like me would have to come set things right eventually.)
Or you find a realtor who was one of us, who’d sell to another witch, someone set up to understand how to deal with the magics that were here. I’d bet money that Grandpa’s death came upon him suddenly enough that he didn’t have time to defuse some of the magics in place.
That was why the boys didn’t inherit the house. Had to be.
Or maybe I was just gassing myself up, but hell, they had magic and I could use the fuel if not the type. I don’t like borrowing types of magic- always feels weird- but under the circumstances, I needed it.
“I’m gonna go talk to them.” I got up, and I heard her wheezing start again.
No help for it. I was just going to have to let her panic, for a minute.
I walked over to the corpses, who were digging, and they both turned to look at me.
Well.
Point their sightless faces at me.
I won’t lie, it was unsettling.
“I beg your pardon, you do not seem to be using your magic at the moment and, given the circumstances-”
They both held their hands out to me.
“I’m really very sorry for what’s been done to you,” I said, and reached out. The bone was covered in mud, which was somehow less disturbing than the strange rubbery/leathery texture of his hand (also covered in mud). They were pushing their magic to me, which made it easy for me to draw it into myself. Offering their full gifts to me, understanding what I was asking for without really having to be told.
I wish that I had met these good people when they were alive. I think they would have been really nice to know, and it’s a shame that I only ever got to know the slimmest little sliver of them. I think we could have been friends. Maybe I’d have been able to help keep an eye on the boys for them, when they were gone.
“My friend is gonna help put you back to rest, as soon as she’s able.” It was the only thing I had to offer to them- not the rest itself, that was Tabitha’s gift, but the hope.
Their magic swelled, braiding with mine in ways I hadn’t felt before. I suppose, since they were dead, they weren’t holding onto any of it, like most people do. It didn’t feel as awkward as it usually did- like trying to hold too many things in only two hands.
For a moment, I felt invincible. Unstoppable.
I’d forgotten, for a moment, that Grandma had the Sight. I saw… a confusing flash of images. Tabby snarling in the headlights of the truck as the storm sirens kicked on, rain pouring down.
I saw backwards, too.
Grandma must be guiding me- she was showing me how Grandpa hid the money for her- breaking the earth apart into fine particles, and letting it slide into it. “Thank you,” I said.
She nodded.
“Okay, Tabby,” I said, reaching out with this new power. “I need you to lift your hands up.”
“I can’t, Callahan.” It was almost a wail, so unlike her that I decided to ignore it.
“Yes you can, Tabby-cat, you need to trust me. I’ve got you, I swear.” It was so easy, the earth answered to the magic it had known for decades, and parted.
She looked up at me, and I saw the earth shift, her eyes lighting up suddenly as she reached up, reached up for me.
I took her hands and lifted her up, pulling her out of the soil, pulling her into my arms (where she belongs) and holding her for a moment as she trembled.
She was in pain.
“What’s wrong? What’s hurting?”
“She did something to my feet,” she said, her head buried in my chest.
This access to the earth magic would fade, I knew- it always did- but for now, I had it, and there was plenty around. (I had a pretty shocking amount in my body, too. I do not have a large capacity, but sometimes borrowed magic does this.)
“I’m gonna heal you, okay?”
She nodded.
I’ve done this before, borrowing people’s magic. It’s not even the first time I’ve had earth magic, it’s definitely not the first time I’ve twisted it into magic I can use to heal someone, pouring that into poor Tabitha, who was clinging to me like her life depended on it.
(It was certainly the easiest time I had with it, but I figure that it’s something you get better at with more experience, right?)
After a moment, she gingerly let me go, and I realized she had been clinging to me because she couldn’t put weight on her busted feet. She looked up at me, tears streaking her face, which was coated (like the rest of her) in a moderate amount of Oklahoma iron-red dust.
“The sigils,” she said. “Erase the sigils.”
(Back to business. Right.)
It was so easily done I almost laughed. “Do you have this much power all the time?” I asked, knowing she couldn’t really answer me.
She turned to face the dead, ignoring me.
Which was fair, I asked question she couldn’t answer.
“Are you ready to go back to sleep?” she asked them.
The two corpses stopped, and looked at her. They sat down, and embraced each other.
They collapsed a moment later. The scent of her magic was strong.
(You’d think it smells bad, but mostly it smells like the autumn, to me. Dead leaves and mushrooms and firewood.)
She didn’t move. She didn’t need to touch them, that wasn’t how her magic worked. “Sleep well,” she said, her voice soft.
Then she turned immediately and started to leave with a quickness.
I dreaded the next time we had to crawl into someone’s basement or something. I rely on her to see what I miss, but if she’s reliving her goddamned trauma I’ve got no right to drag her down with me. Worse thing is she’ll likely make herself do it anyway, because she’s got a stubborn streak a mile long and equally wide running through her.
(What if she won’t do this with me anymore?)
We made it out into the night air, and I was glad to see that I’d flicked on the porch light, because the storm had rolled in and the sky was that dark velvet black you get when heavy clouds fill the night sky.
Lightning flashed, and thunder rolled, and Tabitha stopped and took several deep, gasping breaths.
“You’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay, you’re safe.” I reached out, wanting to touch her but knowing how prickly she can be. I wanted to put my had on her shoulder, or back, or something. But I’d definitely pushed things too far, holding her the way I was, and if I weren’t more careful, she was definitely going to learn some things about me that would- well, annoy her, at the very least.
She turned, and saw me reaching, and took my hand, squeezing it. “Thank you,” she said. “I-” She didn’t seem to know what to say, though, after that.
“It’s okay, you don’t need to-”
She stepped close and wrapped her arms around me, holding me tight.
And I held her. Pressed her head to my chest and felt her sigh against me. Her hummingbird heartbeat, going so fast.
We really couldn’t afford to spend the time, but we just stood there for a moment, embracing. Feeling each other breathe, and be alive. Feel her heartbeat slow down a bit.
“We have to go,” I said.
“Yeah. I don’t think she’s coming back,” she said. “I think she felt the siphon drop and took off. I can’t feel my magic around, anymore. And I want it back.”
I nodded. “Well. She’s a brand new Necromancer all full of death magic and can see it for the first time, so you’ve got three guesses on where she went, and the first two don’t count.”
She sighed. “Maybe we can wrap this up before the storm gets bad.” She still hadn’t let go.
“I hate to tell you, Miss Tabitha, but I do believe that’s wishful thinking.”
She sighed. “Well. Shit.”
“We still gotta go, though.”
“Yup,” she said. She sighed. She let go of me and stepped back with what I believe (hope) was great reluctance. “Let’s go.”
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