Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Thirty-Three

Under Your Spell —The Sweeplings

Not a single tree in the cemetery grew straight toward the heavens. The trunks bent and twisted over mossy graves, leafless branches drawn down like claws as if squeezing the sunset bloody. Wasps buzzed in the warm night. Perched atop a sunken iron gate a nightjar swallowed a moth. A powdered wing fluttered into the overgrown perimeter of dry grass. Tonight the graves were still warm with the heat of the day, but fresh in the way of recent burials. According to a placard pulled from tangled weeds, no one had been buried here in half a century. But tonight, tonight, a shaman walked these desiccated grounds.

He'd killed a dog, then a hen, and with bundled crow's feathers brushed their blood over several points along the rusty fence keeping the dead from the living.

And now, as the blood dried dark in the soil and daylight withered on a cloudy horizon, the inhabitants were beginning to stir.

Samson trailed behind me, stopping now and then to turn his tattered ears toward the ground. After leaving Evan, I'd spent the afternoon washing and cleaning the cat as best I could. Pulled off the ticks and burrowing maggots, rinsed his fur and tried stitching over some of the gouges in his corpse. He sat through it all like he had in the past, a polite fluffy gentleman, although now he was less fluffy and his stench was nigh unbearable indoors.

"Tasha?"

Nursing a long cut on my forearm, I called for the vampire as I paced the cemetery. Zakar had set up shop at the far end of the graveyard in a thicket of dead trees. The graves were worn or entirely unmarked that far in. With wilderness behind and a lonely stretch of road out front, there'd be no one to hear Evan scream.

Like no one had heard the dog's scream or mine. The moment I saw the shaman dragging along the dog I'd walked up and clocked him, and then Zakar had tutted in the rustling grasses and I'd temporarily lost my human privileges. I'd sat, frozen, limp, watching the dog and then the hen run in circles on a dirty rope as the demon's newest assistant spewed off a sacrificial enchantment.

When he had finished, the shaman, who went by the name of Jaxon Valentine, had gripped my chin in his hand and smiled. "Don't worry, doll, I'll be quick," he said. With my eyes on his, I could only feel the edge of the knife sink into my skin, the meaty pull down my arm. "Not with you, of course."

And when the animals were dead, sensation slipped back through my body and I'd fled the scene before the tangy scent and quivering limbs set my stomach roaring.

"Tasha?" I called again.

A boot kicked up on the far side of a statue. She lay draped in arms of stone, head hanging loosely against the chest of a hooded, faceless carving. The woman's pupils had grown heavy and black in anticipation of twilight.

I moved toward her, my feet sinking into the soil an inch or two with every step, as though I was walking through my garden beds after weeding and tilling the soil. Worms, fat and fleshy, wriggled over my bare toes.

"Tasha," I snapped, kicking a worm off.

Her face took on a ruddy full glow in the waning light. "What do you want?"

"Something bad's gonna happen," I said, turning my hand over as though expecting it to sprout into a wendigo's paw. A nervous hunger swam beneath my skin, cruised the dark waters of my heart in tightening circles. "Something worse than Evan's death. Can't you feel it?"

"So what?" She leaned up to press her lips on the statue's cheek, leaving behind a faint, gritty smear of lipstick. "I like worse."

"You aren't helping me any," I told her, itching at the feeling, at the red cut skin of my arm. "If you want to help me, if you want to save me, you need to leave."