Page 48 of Transfiguration

“I thought it wasn’t real…”

“What wasn’t real?”

“I don’t know… Don’t let it take you.”

Sam held Con tight, a hand in his hair gripping hard enough to hurt, but it was grounding. Standing in this mess of power was like being back there, all those years ago in that location in the north, manipulated, drained, abused for the draw of power. “Roman is dead,” Con whispered.

“He is,” Gabe said. “I remember that clearly.”

“Fellow witches feel a void,” Seiran said. “They can’t see or feel the rest of it like I can.” He waved his hand at the area. “Like magic itself was suctioned from this space. Yet… not? It’s not a nullification spell, though other witches might sense it that way. It’s draining if we stand close for too long.”

“I feel it too,” Sam corrected. “And there’s more.”

Con didn’t want to see more. He didn’t want to dive back into those memories. He had a kid to take care of now. Couldn’t he just go home and play games and curl up with Luca, let others handle nightmares like this?

“You never saw that symbol before?” Seiran asked, pointing at the trees. Even with most of them partially destroyed, Con could make out the bone in fire outline. “You dig up a lot of artifacts.”

“Just in the bunker where Bella was, and it didn’t feel like this in there,” Con said. “It was like any other hole-in-the-wall hovel. Most places where witches store artifacts aren’t really all that complicated. No fancy vaults or massive spell work. And none have ever felt like this.” Like silence and death were crawling through him, over him, looking for a way to devour his soul if it could. “Last time I encountered this feeling was when Roman killed my sister and they both fed on me.”

“I’m sorry to ask, but can we show you? Can you tell us what you see? Maybe you can help us understand what we are missing?”

“Isn’t all this from the zombies?” Con looked at Sam and then to Gabe, who everyone told him was a necromancer. He clung to the hope that all it was, was necromancy, as if zombies were ever a small thing. “The smell, the feeling, all of it?”

“We’ve put them back in the ground,” Sam said. “But the smell seems to linger. The rest, this feeling, is not from the zombies.”

“Dead don’t feel like much,” Gabe said. “The smell is usually the first hint they are near. Only another necromancer will sense them. They are organic material. And their magic signature is weak, but not absent like this.”

“Recognized by the earth as a fallen leaf or wilted plant. Fuel for regrowth,” Seiran added.

“What about the blood?” Con asked. Was it his imagination, maybe his memories overriding his normal senses? He remembered being pinned down and fed on. He buried the scars beneath his ink. The spill of blood had painted his skin in nightmares that never truly went away. Sometimes others had died in his place. Roman and Kat had been more revenant than vampire, and tore up everything except him. Kat had protected him, healed him, and eventually let him escape. Only when Roman attempted to kill him did her human side rise above the revenant. They had physically fought more than once, Roman leaving Kat bleeding and badly injured, but always relenting to let Con live.

Con shouldn’t smell blood. She was gone. That whole mess was more than a decade in the past.

“Blood magic fuels a lot of bullshit, but I smell it too,” Sam agreed. He tugged Con forward. “I won’t make you go in the cabin. It’s a nightmare anyway, even though it’s gutted now. Was just a slaughterhouse. A place to torture vampires and witches and anyone else who got in their way. Silence spells cast on it to keep the screams from being heard. We suspect they took power from witches in there, like the inheritance ceremony, but we don’t really know what they wanted from the vampires. What I wanted you to see is behind the cabin.”

“I thought this was all the Dominion witches crap?” Con asked as they approached the cabin but kept a wide berth around it. Behind the small shack was a wide-open area of scorched earth. It was a strange black etching over the ground and everything for at least a dozen yards, like a burn, only darker? Soot? Paint?

Someone had carved the trees back over an acre to give room for whatever this dark spread was. All the trees had blotches of burns in them, but some only partially covered what had been the symbol of the bone in fire. The sign of a cult? Had they done this? Was it to call a demon, or something else?

Con stared at it, realizing he needed to take a few steps back to see the mass of runes become some sort of symbol. His gut twisted in a visceral reaction he couldn’t explain. Whatever it created stirred a sense of doom within him, his magic screaming in terror. It was wrong, whatever it was.

“What the hell…” Con said, horrified at the size and the pulsing edge of oozing blackness that came from it. “What is it doing?” He fought to make sense of the runes etched to create the symbol, but he couldn’t focus on them, as though the spell kept them from defining anything specific. He had to narrow his vision to one rune at a time to clarify the lines. Defining them all would take ages that way. “This is insane. What the fuck did they call?” Because that was what it felt like. Ley lines forced together as some sort of gateway, ripping magic from this world.

“We aren’t sure,” Seiran said, keeping his distance. “It’s etched deep. Hurts to get close.” He shivered, keeping close to Gabe. “My magic can’t get near it. I’ve dug up stuff, found pieces of this,” he waved at the trees around them and the burned symbols, “related to a group that calls themselves Kresnik, vampire hunters of legend.”

“Dug up where? I’ve seen nothing like this in the Fellowship,” Con said.

“Me neither,” Sam said grimly.

“That’s the problem,” Seiran said. “I foundnothingabout it in the Fellowship, which is an organization that claims to know something about everything. They gather information, research it, store it in massive databases. Hart takes pride in knowing the most, but I found nothing in the Fellowship archives. Not a single hint of the Kresnik. There is more in history books, which are plenty vague. It’s mostly written off as fiction rather than actual historical fact.”

“It is unusual that the Fellowship would know nothing,” Gabe added. “Thousands of investigators across the world digging up information and no one encounters a secret organization of vampire hunters? Or another mark like this that used massive death to force the ley lines to converge?”

“Are there people in the Fellowship who know about these Kresnik people and are deleting information?” Sam asked.

“Like they were in the Ascendance before,” Seiran agreed.

“Fuck,” Con said. “It wasn’t anything like this. It was just a wax stamp on a box. Not…” he waved his hand at the pulsing mass with death, the energy of those sacrificed? It felt like a portal or a doorway. Did they summon demons? Had they planned to use Bella for that? “Does Hart know?”