Year One

  He prowled as they talked, prowled, she thought, and considered options, directions.

  “We’ll try one of the nearby towns, see if we can find some sort of communication. Or people. We hit three cabins, Lana, and found no sign of anyone. We need to figure out how to self-sustain first, and yeah, you’re right, try to find out what’s going on.”

  “Eddie found something.” Lana lowered her voice, glancing back to make sure they were alone. “When he walked Joe this morning, he found some sort of circle of stones back in the woods, and the ground in the center was burned. Not like a campfire. Something off with it, he told me. And Joe wouldn’t go near it, and that he felt, well, he said it wasn’t right, wasn’t natural.”

  “It’s easy to get spooked,” Max speculated, “but we should take a look.”

  “I didn’t say anything to the others. There’s no point in raising alarm.”

  Absently, he brushed a hand down her arm. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “Promise. In fact, I feel less dragged out than I did this morning. Making soup’s therapeutic.”

  “Then let’s get Eddie, go check this out. Anybody asks, we’re getting some air.”

  “More firewood,” Lana suggested.

  “Even better.”

  She’d never been much for winter or tromping through the snow, and Lana could admit without shame she preferred urban hiking through Chelsea or the old Meatpacking District to a hike through a mountain forest.

  But there was something astonishing about walking through snapping crisp air, the scent of pine and snow, the somehow majestic silence while an energetic young dog leaped and bounded.

  An enormous buck stepped out of the trees to stare at them fearlessly, making her gasp.

  “That’s a lot of venison,” Max commented, killing the wonder of the moment for her. “Sorry, but we have to think in practicalities. We found a rifle and a shotgun—both with ammo—in the cabins we went through. Kim suggested stowing them in the garden shed for now. It seemed like a good call.”

  “We have enough food for a couple of weeks” was all Lana said.

  “You can see where me and Joe broke the trail through here.” Eddie gestured. “Shaun’s folks got some nice land. The going gets pretty steep that way, and I didn’t feel all the way up for that much of a hike, so we headed off here. Hey, Joe! Dude! Come on back here.”

  The dog came back, but bellied through the snow to stick close to Eddie’s side.

  “He’s figured out we’re going back to the weird. Gives me the bumps of goose right with him.”

  “Way out of sight of the house,” Max observed. “Did you see footprints?”

  “Didn’t, but it was snowing pretty good when we got here, so if whoever was back here was back here before that?” Eddie spread his hands, then lowered one to rub Joe’s head. “Not gonna let any boogie shoes get you, doggie dude.” Murmuring to Joe, Eddie continued to stroke and soothe. “He’s shaking some.”

  “It’s this way?”

  “Yeah, up and around that bend—see where we went through before?”

  “Yeah.” Max nodded. “Why don’t you wait here with Joe?”

  “Don’t mind using my pal here to wimp out. But if you need help, give a shout and we’ll come.”

  “You stay with Eddie,” Max said to Lana. “I’ll go check it out.”

  “We’ll check it out.” She took his hand. “If it is magickal, two witches are better than one.”

  When she took the first step forward, he didn’t argue.

  As they approached the bend, she tightened her grip on his hand. “It’s colder. Can you feel it?”

  “Yeah. And the air feels thinner.”

  He saw it then. He’d expected to find some sort of botched amateur campfire—something like a survivor as inexperienced as himself might attempt. But he knew now what lay ahead hadn’t been the result of an amateur attempt to provide heat and light.

  What lay ahead was cold and dark and deliberate.

  “Dark.” Lana’s murmur echoed his thoughts. “Max, what dark ritual would have done this?”

  “We don’t know enough. We don’t even know enough about what’s changed in us, what’s growing in us. But someone knows about the black, and twisting the Craft to the dark.”

  “Out of sight of the house, but still, too close.” She felt her skin shudder as they approached the circle.

  Rough stones laid in a perfect circle, as if set on a line drawn by a compass. Within it the ground was spread black and slick as tar. And that, too, was spread in a perfect circle, without a trace of the snow that had fallen on its surface or the stones around it.

  “I … Do you smell blood?”

  “Yes.” He kept her hand firmly in his.

  “Do you think this was a blood sacrifice?”

  “Yes. But for what purpose? For what power? Lana!” He tried to jerk her back, but she had crouched, reached out, touched a stone.

  It jolted through her, that dark, grasping power. It stung her fingers, even through gloves. And in its flash, she saw blood pour into the circle, heard a voice raised in triumph call out.

  “A deer. A young deer. Its throat slit.” She turned into Max’s arms when he yanked her away. “I could see it, and the way the blood pooled into the circle. Then the fire—ice-cold, consuming all. I heard…”

  “What?” He held her more tightly as she burrowed against him. “What did you hear?”

  “I couldn’t really understand it—it was like a roar more than a voice. But it called for Eris.”

  “Goddess of strife. We need to try to purify it. The ritual’s done, and we can’t turn that back. But this thing still has power.”

  “And it’s pulling power, I think. Or will, in the dark.”

  He opened the pack they’d filled with items from their supplies. Three white candles, his athame, a small container of salt, a handful of crystals.

  “I don’t know if it’s enough, if we’re enough.”

  “We’ve done pretty well so far,” he reminded her.

  He set the candles in the snow outside the circle while Lana scattered the crystals between their points.

  “We don’t know what to say.” Still, she poured salt into his palm, then into her own.

  “I think we need to call on powers of the light, ask for their help in basic purification.”

  “This isn’t basic.”

  As she spoke, she heard the cries, looked up.

  Crows circled in the hard winter sky. Something pulsed inside her that was both fear and knowledge.

  “I dreamt of crows, do you see them? A murder of crows come to gloat, come to feed.”

  “Lana—”

  “Light the candles white and bright, and their flames will turn this right. Spark the crystals, clean and pure, and their power will endure. Call to the north, the south, the east, the west, unite and from evil power we wrest.”

  The wind whipped as she spoke, sending her hair flying. Her eyes went opaque as she turned to him, lifting her arms.

  “Call!”

  He felt her power—the sudden flash of it—burn into him. Lifted his athame. North, south, east, west.

  Above them, the crows screamed. Around them, the air pulsed.

  Eddie came on the run, breathless, a hand pressed to his healing wound. “Holy fuck.”

  “Candles light.” Lana held out a hand, and the three candles flamed. “Crystals spark.” She threw it out again, and the crystals glowed as if lit from within.

  “Here is light against the dark.” Bending, she picked up a burning candle. “Take one.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Take one,” she ordered Eddie again. “You’re a child of humanity. You’re of the light. Light burns through the dark.” She tossed her candle into the circle. The ground rose up, writhed.

  With a shaking hand, Eddie threw in his. Blood bubbled to the surface, fouling the air. Max tossed in his.

  “And here is faith against fear
.” Lana scooped up the crystals burning against the snow, poured them in.

  Smoke billowed.

  With an audible swallow, Eddie plucked crystals from the ground, dropped them in. Then Max.

  “It fights, it seethes, it snarls, and its creatures scream for blood. It will have blood, both good and ill. But it will never win. Now salt to smother what evil sought to free.”

  She stepped over, poured some into Eddie’s hand.

  “As I will.” She threw salt into the pit. “As you will,” she said to Eddie. “As we will.” She looked at Max. “So mote it be.”

  Three scant handfuls of salt expanded and spread over the black in a white layer. Thunder shuddered from the sky, from under the earth. Then the circle filled with a white flash.

  When it faded, the ground inside the stone lay bare, its scarred earth quiet. Overhead a single cardinal winged, and vanished scarlet, into the forest.

  “It wasn’t me, exactly,” Lana managed.

  “It was you.” Max strode to her, pulling her close. “I felt you. I felt you in me, over me. Everywhere. Power awakened.”

  She shook her head, but didn’t know how to explain. Now that what had risen in her had ebbed, she couldn’t see any answers.

  “Ah, hey, guys?” Eddie sat on the snowy ground, gathering Joe to him. “Am I, like, you know, a witch?”

  Lana found she had an answer after all. Easing away from Max, she crouched down, stroked Joe with one hand, cupped Eddie’s face with another.

  “No. What you are is a good man.”

  “But, like, a regular dude?”

  “I’d go with special, but yeah. You’re a regular dude, Eddie.”

  “Cool.” He heaved out a relieved breath. “That was way out of the awesome, but I’d like to get the flock away from here if it’s okay now.”

  “What was done was done.” Max looked back at the dead earth. “But it won’t be done here again. We’ll head back. We’ve already been gone longer than we intended. We should grab some downed branches on the way.”

  “For cover.” Eddie accepted Max’s outstretched hand, pulled himself up. “Because maybe one of them…”

  “No point taking that chance.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Arlys Reid’s childhood home sat sturdily on just shy of an acre in a neighborhood southeast of Columbus. People owned their homes here—the brick ranches, the tidy and old-fashioned split-levels, the bungalows, and the Cape Cods.

  It was a neighborhood of screened porches and chain-link fences.

  While most of the homes had been built in the post–World War II boom, generations of owners made changes. A deck, a bonus room, a second story with dormers, man caves, and great rooms.

  She’d grown up riding her bike on the frost-heaved sidewalks and playing in the grassy park with its fringe of trees.

  Until she’d left for college, it had been the only home she’d known in the quiet middle-class neighborhood that edged toward dull.

  As their convoy of two turned onto her old street, nostalgia and hope squeezed her heart in brutal, twisting hands.

  “Never would’ve pegged you for Midwestern suburbia.”

  She stared out the window, thinking of neighbors she’d known. The Minnows, the Clarkstons, the Andersons, the Malleys.

  She remembered, clear as day, coming home from school to find her mother sitting with a tearful Mrs. Malley in the kitchen—and having herself shooed out.

  Mr. Malley, father of three, manager of the local bank, and backyard barbecue king, had fallen in love with his dental hygienist, had moved out that very morning, and wanted a divorce.

  Small matters now, she thought as they passed houses with darkened windows, with curtains drawn tight on a street where no snowplow had passed for weeks.

  She turned to Chuck. “It was a good place to grow up.” Something she hadn’t appreciated until she’d left it behind. “There, on the right. Brick house with the dormers and the covered front porch.”

  “It’s really pretty,” Fred said from the back. “A really big yard. I always wanted a really big yard.”

  Inside Arlys, the low-grade stress that had lived in her through this last leg, with its detours, its inching progress, spiked. The really big yard Fred admired formed a white blanket, straight across the driveway, and piled at least a foot in front of the closed garage doors.

  No one had shoveled the drive, the front steps, the walk.

  The eyes of the front windows showed dark with tightly closed curtains. The azaleas her mother prized formed misshapen white lumps.

  Chuck pushed up the drive in the Humvee so Jonah could follow in his tracks. Arlys shoved out, went nearly knee-deep in snow. Heart hammering, face burning hot, she waded through it.

  “Hold on, Arlys.” Chuck pumped his long legs behind her. “Just slow down.”

  “I have to see. My mother … I have to see.”

  “Okay, okay, but not alone.” He had to wrap an arm around her shoulders to slow her down. “Remember, we all agreed? Nobody goes anywhere without a buddy. We’re your buds.”

  “They haven’t shoveled the porch, the steps, the walk. Somebody always shovels the snow. Why haven’t they cleaned off the bushes? She’d never let snow pile on her azaleas. I have to see.”

  She pushed past one of the pink dogwoods her father had planted when a storm damaged the old red maple.

  “Hold it right there!”

  Arlys heard a hard slide and click. Chuck’s arm released her as he tossed his hands in the air. “Take it easy, mister.”

  “Just keep your hands up. All of you! Hands up.”

  In a half daze, Arlys turned, stared at the man in boots and a flannel jacket who was holding a shotgun while his glasses slid down his nose.

  “Mr. Anderson?”

  Behind his silver-framed glasses, his eyes flicked from Chuck toward Arlys. Recognition sparked in them. “Arlys? Is that Arlys Reid?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He lowered the gun, broke the stock open, then plowed through the snow to reach her. “Didn’t recognize you.” His voice cracked as he wrapped one arm around her in a hug. “Didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I’ve been trying to get here, trying to … My parents.”

  Because she knew, already knew, her throat narrowed on grief, then just closed.

  Now his hand rubbed up and down her back, already comforting. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, honey. I’m sorry.”

  She’d already known, and still it came as a blow to the heart. For a moment she just pressed her face to his shoulder. Caught the faint scent of tobacco.

  Remembered how he’d liked to sit out on his front porch after dinner, smoking a cigar, sipping a whiskey. How she’d seen him out there from her bedroom window, cold or heat, rain or shine.

  “When?”

  “I guess it’s been two weeks, or near to three for your dad. Your mom a few days after. Your mom had your brother bring your dad home from the hospital. He didn’t want to go there. And she, well, she never went. So, and I hope it’s some solace for you, they died at home like they wanted. I helped Theo bury them in the backyard, between those weeping cherries your mom loved so much.”

  “Theo.”

  “Honey, I … I buried him myself not a week later. I wish I could give you better news.”

  She drew back, stared into eyes full of sorrow and sympathy. “I need to…”

  “Sure you do. Listen, honey, the power’s been out for a while now, so there’s no heat or light, but I’ve got the keys right here if you want to go inside.”

  “Yes, yes, but I need to go out back. I need to see.”

  “You go ahead.”

  “We’re on the buddy system,” Chuck began as Arlys trudged away. “Should I—”

  “She’s all right,” Fred told him. “I’ll go after her in a minute, but she needs to be alone first. I’m Fred. I worked with Arlys in New York. This is Chuck.”

  “Bill Anderson. We lived across the street from
Arlys and her family more than thirty years.”

  “These are our friends,” Fred continued. “Rachel and Katie and Jonah, and the babies.”

  “Babies?” Some light moved into his face as he adjusted his glasses. “I’ll be damned, three of them? We ought to get them inside. We shouldn’t stand out here in the open too long.”

  He fished in his pocket, took out a huge ring with dozens of keys.

  “Have you had any problems—violence?” Jonah amended.

  “Had some trouble early on, and some spots here and there off and on. Nobody much left now,” he continued as he kicked his way up to the porch. “Van Thompson down the block, he’s gone a little crazy. He shoots at shadows, inside the house and out. Set his own car on fire a couple nights ago, yelling how there were demons inside it.”

  He picked through the keys, all labeled, pulled out the ones marked Reid, and unlocked the door.

  “Feels colder in than out, but it’s better to be inside.”

  The house opened to a traditional living room, pin-neat.

  Bill let out a little sigh. “I cleaned out most of the supplies. Didn’t see the point in leaving them. If you’re hungry, I’ve got food and my camp stove and whatnot over at the house. I can bring it over.”

  “We’re fine.” Rachel pulled off her cap.

  “I’m going to go out now, to Arlys. Thanks for letting us come inside, Mr. Anderson.”

  “Bill.” He smiled at Fred. “As hard as it is, it’s good to have people around.”

  Outside, under the skeletal branches of the weeping cherries, Arlys stood looking at three graves. Marked with crosses made from wood scraps. Had Mr. Anderson dug out Theo’s old woodburning kit to write the names?

  Robert Reid

  Carolyn Reid

  Theodore Reid

  But … but … Her father had always been so strong, her mother so vibrant, her brother so young. How could they all be gone? How could their lives just be over?

  How much had they suffered? How much had they feared while she’d been in New York telling lies and half-truths to a camera?

  “I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

  Arlys squeezed her eyes shut as Fred put an arm around her waist. “I know you’re sad. I’m so sorry.”