Page 36 of A Skirl of Sorcery (The Cat Lady Chronicles #3)

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

When Slasher walked into the room, her eyes glittering and triumphant, I was genuinely astonished. She’d been in on this damned business from the beginning? Unbelievable.

Then I saw who had followed her down the stairs. That wasn’t Jimmy Leighton, it was Arthur bloody Dinsbury. Suddenly I knew exactly why they were there. Those absolute idiots would ruin everything.

‘So you’re in this together,’ Slasher crowed. ‘I suspected as much. I knew there was more to you than meets the eye.’

Uh-huh. I studied her as I wondered how to play this situation.

Bizarrely, although Slasher was dressed in black from head to toe, she was wearing the same scarlet lipstick; it wasn’t yet six o’clock in the morning, she was on a complicated spying mission – and she had perfectly applied lippy.

That showed true dedication to the cause of make-up.

I found my voice. ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You decided to gang up and stake out Keres. You followed her here.’

‘It’s as well that we did!’ Dinsbury nodded at the dagger in my hand. ‘You’re going to kill that poor bugger Jimmy Leighton, aren’t you? You’re in this murder business. You’re planning to be a killer, not a cat lady!’

Oh, if only he knew. ‘You’ve misunderstood this situation,’ I began calmly.

‘I don’t think we have!’ Slasher yelled. ‘And don’t try anything. My husband knows exactly where we are. If anything happens to us, you’ll be hunted down in an instant!’

I winced. ‘Keep your voice down!’

‘I will not! I don’t care what sort of weapon you’re wielding, I will not stay quiet. You’ve been caught bang to rights!’

Nothing about this was good. Leighton could return at any moment. I returned the dagger to its sheath. ‘The weapon has gone. Now please, indoor voices – in fact, indoor whispers.’

‘She’s holding something,’ Dinsbury said. ‘That thing behind you has a weapon too.’

‘It’s not a weapon.’ I gritted my teeth. ‘And she’s not a thing.’

‘Do it, Arthur,’ Slasher hissed. ‘Use it!’

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a black-linen bag about two inches wide. My heart sank; I already had a bad feeling about what was inside it.

Dinsbury cleared his throat and held it up. ‘This,’ he declared, ‘is death powder.’

Thank goodness. I relaxed slightly. ‘Really.’ My voice was flat.

He smacked his lips together. ‘Really.’

‘It’s fresh,’ Slasher said. ‘I got it from the witchery store where I work yesterday.’

I held my patience. ‘If you work there you should know that death powder almost never works.’

‘Of course it works!’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? One pinch of powder applied to someone’s skin and they suddenly die? Don’t you think that if it had any effect then lots of people would use it? You must know that nobody buys that stuff.’

‘Because it’s dangerous!’ she spat.

‘No, because it’s next to useless,’ I said patiently. ‘The worst you’ll get is a mild rash.’

‘So why is it called death powder if it doesn’t cause death?’

‘Because it kills common sense,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Look, let’s all take a beat and…’

‘Drop that damned box!’ Dinsbury shouted at Keres.

Slasher immediately matched his energy. ‘Drop it!’ she shrieked. She ran forward, pushing past me to get to her. I lunged for Slasher as she lunged for the bone box and tried to wrestle it from Keres’ hands.

‘Stop it!’ Keres screamed. ‘It’s mine! It’s me!’

I grabbed Slasher’s arm and hauled her back just as she gained a decent grip on the box, then for one strange moment everything seemed to stand still. Keres’ face was a rictus mask of fear and Slasher’s wasn’t much different. Arthur Dinsbury was holding aloft his bag of silly powder.

Slasher tried to grasp the box as I wrenched at her arm, and in the confusion it slipped from Keres’ fingers and fell to the floor, breaking into shards and releasing what was inside it.

The ban sith cried out sharply and fell to her knees, but it was already too late. A strange mixture, not quite a liquid and not quite a gas, was leaking from the broken box. It was sliding across the floor and rising up at the same time, as if it couldn’t make up its mind what it was.

It certainly didn’t look like the black miasmic goop that had been left behind after Leighton had performed his magic thefts. It glittered and sparkled and contained threads of black, royal purple, iridescent yellow and glowing green.

This was magic; this was the ban sith power that had been ripped from Keres’ body – and it was leaking everywhere.

Keres threw herself towards the substance and tried to gather it up. One tendril had already snaked towards Arthur Dinsbury’s foot and was coiling around his ankle and his shin; another had reached Slasher and, horrifyingly, was entering her body via her open, lipsticked mouth.

I looked down as a thin ribbon attached itself to my arm. My skin tingled and I realised my skin was absorbing the power. Bloody hell.

Slasher was choking, while Arthur Dinsbury was slapping violently at his leg as he tried to beat the substance away.

I scratched vigorously at my arm, but I knew that some of Keres’ magic was already seeping into me.

It was only a fraction of her power because most of it was being reabsorbed into her body, but it was still magic that didn’t belong to me and that I didn’t want.

‘Get off!’ Dinsbury roared. ‘Get off me!’

Slasher wheezed. ‘I can’t breathe! Help me. Help me!’

Keres was smiling beatifically, her expression one of pure ecstasy. ‘Mine,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Me.’

And suddenly a fourth voice entered the mix. ‘Who the fuck are you lot and what are you doing in my house?’

I looked up. Oh. Jimmy Leighton was home.

I stopped caring about the unfamiliar magic soaking into my skin and sprang to the far corner where hopefully I’d be behind him when he came into the room. With three mostly innocent people here, the game had changed and I had to react appropriately.

If Leighton had any nous he’d lock us in until he found a magical grenade to toss in and end us all, but I doubted he was used to confronting his victims. Hopefully the shock of finding four people inside his home would be enough to encourage him to come into the basement to see who we were.

He would also want to protect his bone boxes – and their gruesome contents.

When he clumped down the last few stairs and barrelled towards Keres, I knew my guess had been right. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘That’s my box! That’s my magic!’

Keres was still smiling broadly – and that was chilling, considering the circumstances. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘It’s mine. It’s all mine.’ She touched her chest and gazed at Leighton as he clenched his fists and prepared to swing at her. ‘I am whole once again.’

‘Fuck you!’ he shrieked. ‘Fuck you!’ He punched her on the side of the head and she went reeling.

My dagger was already back in my hand but I hadn’t yet moved in Leighton’s direction. I had to get this right; an ill-thought-out move might ruin everything. Unfortunately getting my moves right was easier said than done given the presence of both Arthur Dinsbury and Slasher.

Slasher, whose choking fit appeared to have been more psychological than physical, was staring open-mouthed at Leighton. ‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘So beautiful.’

Then Dinsbury got in on the act. The tendrils of magic around his leg had almost disappeared and he was gazing at the bearded, thieving bastard with genuine awe. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.’ He reached forward as if to stroke Leighton.

What the hell…? Then I saw what they were seeing.

Jimmy Leighton, resident of Danksville, son of witch and minor druid, stealer of souls, destroyer of lives, was glowing. I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. A silvery light that resembled nothing I’d seen before in my life was emanating from his pores.

Something deep inside tugged at me; a deep desire was forming in my gut and I wasn’t sure I could quash it.

‘You broke into my house!’ Leighton howled. ‘You destroyed my box!’ He raised his leg and kicked Keres then rounded on Dinsbury and smacked him in the face before taking a flick knife from his pocket and releasing the blade to wave it in Slasher’s face. ‘You bastards! You’ve tainted my collection!’

Slasher didn’t look at the knife, she just smiled tenderly and opened her mouth. It wasn’t a scream that escaped her lips or a cry for help but a song. I winced: she was mostly tone deaf.

Her lack of singing ability didn’t affect Arthur Dinsbury. Within a few seconds, he’d added his baritone voice to hers. Then, despite the attack she’d received, Keres joined in from the floor. A similar sound involuntarily left my own lips.

All four of us raised our voices, gaining in pitch and tenor with every beat. The sound was discordant but that didn’t matter; I could no more have stopped singing than I could have stopped my heart from beating. It was extraordinary.

Suddenly I realised what was happening: we were singing the skirl of Jimmy Leighton’s impending death. We could all see it coming and we couldn’t stop it from happening.

Leighton snarled, ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’

We sang louder.

The silly man didn’t understand what the rest of us had already recognised.

He thrust his pocket knife towards Slasher’s throat but it was too short and blunt to cause any real damage.

The woman put up no defence but even so Leighton only scratched her skin; obviously close combat wasn’t his forte.

It was one thing to attack someone from a distance, it was another to try and take their life when you could feel the warmth of their breath.

He tried throwing all his hatred and rage into his voice instead of his blade. ‘I’ll rip your magic from you. I’ll leave you as husks of people. Once I’m done, there’ll be nothing left of you. You’ll be useless hunks of flesh!’

I smiled, changed key and sang more loudly, as did the others. Leighton reached into his pockets again and this time produced a small grey sphere that throbbed with dark magic. There were sticky patches on its surface, traces of the same nasty gloop that had been left on the rooftops of Coldstream.

He held the sphere in both his hands and started to murmur an incantation.

Something sharp twisted in the centre of my chest as if a thin corkscrew had been thrust through my ribcage. I knew the others felt the same because the skirl of our voices faltered.

Panic lit Keres’ eyes for the first time since the bone box had smashed at her feet.

‘What?’ Slasher stepped backwards. ‘What are you doing?’

Arthur Dinsbury’s hands clutched his chest and he gave a strange noise that was half song, half croak. As I watched, he scrabbled at his shirt in growing panic. The drawstring linen bag was still looped around his thumb.

I pushed away the pain in my chest, and the urge to shriek and sing, and smiled. ‘He wants to try and kill us all,’ I said. ‘He’ll reach inside and yank out our magic. He’ll take what makes us what we are and leave us with nothing.’

‘You bet your fucking arse I will,’ Leighton snarled, breaking his incantation. ‘My collection is just about to grow even larger. I have plenty of boxes waiting for you.’

I tightened my grip on my knife hilt. There was a sudden loud thump as Slasher slid to the floor. Keres’ eyes were rolling back in her head. ‘The powder, Arthur,’ I whispered. ‘Use the death powder.’

At first I wasn’t sure he’d heard me but then, with an effort, he removed his hands from his chest. He managed to open the little black bag and throw it in Leighton’s direction. It smacked the bastard in the chest then fell to the floor.

Tears of pain streaming down her cheeks, Slasher reached for it. She hauled herself up to her feet and tossed the powdery contents into Leighton’s face. A moment later, she collapsed again.

I was already moving to the centre of the room. Leighton saw me coming. He turned to me, rage and desperation glittering in his eyes. ‘You,’ he spat. ‘You resisted me before. What are you?’

I opened my mouth and answered him with a high-pitched shriek that should have impressed even Keres.

Then I stabbed him in the chest.

‘Where’s the wolf?’ I asked. ‘Where did you put the wolf soul you stole a few hours ago?’

He didn’t answer, though his eyes flicked in the direction of the staircase. That was enough for me. I twisted my curved blade hard enough to be absolutely sure.

In the very moment that Jimmy Leighton’s heart stopped beating, the overwhelming urge inside me to sing and shriek at the top of my lungs vanished. He was dead. My skirl was no longer required.