8 Gone is the Witch (46 page)

“
Jerome!” he called, but Jerome was nowhere in sight. “Jerome! Come back!” He turned again to us. “We have to wait for him, Tony.”

Tony shook his head softly.
“Carlos, we can’t. We don’t know how long this portal will stay open. We’ve got to go now.”

“
Then we at least have to let him know about the portal. That way he can get back to his side of the world.”

“
Sure. We can do that. Just leave something of yours behind. You can leave it right here at the portal. He’ll find it.”

“I’ll leave my
monk robe. It’s in your sack. He’ll know what it means.”

“Sure
. He’ll know. Leave the whole sack. Maybe he can use it.”

Carlos knelt and placed the
burlap sack at the base of the portal, patting it gently as if saying goodbye to an old friend. He stood and pulled the kinks from his uniform. Tony palmed his shoulder. This time Carlos allowed it. “Okay. I’m ready.”

I
looked at the others. “Is everyone else ready?”

They all answered
yes.

“Good
. We’ll do this just like last time. Leona, that means I’m driving this bus. I want you to clear your mind. I have a spell that will help you do that. The thing to remember is that when we get to town, we may run into some undesirables right away. We’ll have to be ready. Carlos, do you have your bolo?”

“Yup. Got it right here.”

“Tony. Where’s your bayonet?”

“I gave it to Jerome back at the castle when I thought you and I were going to take the swords.”

“You didn’t take it back when we changed our minds?”

“No, because
we
didn’t change our minds.
You
made the decision for us.”

“Forget it. Anyone have any questions?”
A collective shaking of the heads told me to continue. “All right. I’ll start now. Join hands everyone, take a deep breath and relax. Here we go.”

I began my recitation.

“
Through swirling fog of mountain mist, and fields of white that clouds have kissed, let thoughts meander, lost in time, and leave thy heads with clearer minds
.”

As before, with their blank expressions and relaxed minds, I led them into the portal where the tidal force around the opening sucked us in immediately.

At last, w
e were going home.

Chapter Twenty-six

After
stepping into the portal, I focused on images in my mind of the downtown as I remembered it when we first arrived in the ES. I didn’t know where the closest portal to town might be, but I knew it had to be closer than the one we found at old Yammer’s campsite.

To my surprise, the closest
one turned out to be in the same alleyway where it all started for us. We spilled out of the portal and onto the ground in rapid-succession.

“Shit!” I heard Carlos
cry.

“
You all right?” Tony asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right.”

“Then why’d you say shit?”

He began
wiping his hand in the dirt. “Because I landed in shit.”

“Nice. Is everyone else okay?” He
started counting heads and taking stock of our physical well-being.

Ursula had fallen awkwardly on her shoulder and bruised it. Leona,
though wearing a nightgown that offered little in the way of protection, fared surprisingly better. Except for a minor scrape on the knee, she emerged relatively clean and unscathed.

Tony also fared well, as did I, which
seemed to bolster my claim that our luck had changed for the better.

“
This is great,” I said. “I’d never have guessed it.”

“Guessed what?” asked Tony.

“This alleyway, it’s obviously a portal junction, both a stop on the regular pipeline of connections throughout the ES, and a direct-connect line from the ES to Earth.”

“How do you know that?”

“This is where it all started for us.”

“So you mean the portal we just came out of is the same one that brought us here?”

“Oh, no, not at all. They’re two entirely separate pathways. They just coincidentally meet at the same place. The electromagnetic convergence here must be exceptionally strong.”

“I don’t care about convergence, electrometric
hocus pocus or any of that diddly crap,” said Carlos. “I just want to get home. Can we do that now?”

“Of course
.” I turned to Ursula. “We’re going to need the witch’s key to open the next one.”

She palmed her chest and felt around her neckline, softly at first, then more frantically
as she realized the key wasn’t there. I knew from the expression on her face that fate had screwed us again.

“Ursula?”

“It seems I have misplaced it.”

“Misplaced it? Where?”

“I cannot but remember.”

“She didn’t
misplace it,” said Tony.

I
shot him a raised brow what-the-fuck. “How do you know?”

“Jerome
’s got it.”

“
And how do you know that?”

“
This morning at the campsite, the girls went down to the river to freshen up while Carlos and I gutted fish. I saw Jerome with the key.”

“What was he doing with it?”

“Admiring it?”

“And you didn’t take it from him?”

“No. My hands were all fishy.”

“Tony!”

“Hell. Lilith, I didn’t know.”

Carlos asked, “What does this mean?”

I leveled
a biting stare at him designed to shut him up. “It means your little green friend fucked us again. I hope you’re happy.”

I watched the lines
on his face gather in anguish. “No. I’m not happy.”

I turned away in disgust.

“Can we still get home?”

“No,
Carlos. We can’t get home. Don’t you understand what fucked means?”

“All right
.” Tony put his hand on my arm. “Let’s not get hostile. We’ll figure something out.”

“Figure what out, Tony? It’s not as if I can pull another witch’s key out of my
butthole.”

Carlos laughed, perhaps painting a mental picture
of that in his mind. Tony let it go. I let the silence that followed steep in the anger that bore it. What else could I do? I had already sliced and diced Carlos for no good reason. It wasn’t as though I wanted to berate him like that in front of the others. He simply made a good target.

Truth
was, I should have taken it out on myself, instead. Hadn’t I also learned to trust Jerome, just as Carlos did? Didn’t I already know about Jerome’s fascination with the witch’s key? Wasn’t I just as fond of the frog-faced fucker as everybody else was?

I owed Carlos an
apology, and was about to give it to him when he said, “I’ll go back.”

“
You can’t,” said Tony.

“
I have to. I’ll go back through the portal. I’ll find Jerome, get the key and––”

“No.
” I shook my head emphatically. “I agree with Tony. It’s out of the question.”

“But––”

“Carlos.” I took a deep breath and softened my posture to reflect my sullen mood. “We can’t open up that can of worms again. There’s no guarantee that one, the portal will stay open for you, and two, Jerome is still there. If he has the key, he won’t want you to find him. It’s probably the reason he took off in the first place.”

“So where does that leave us?” asked
Tony.

“Between a rock and a fucked-up hard place
.” I looked at Leona. “Excuse the language.”

She turned a shy eye to the ground. “
Is okay, Lilith. I do not hold you in bad thought for bad words. You have saved me from Doctor Lowell. For that I am grateful in my heart, even if you cannot get me home.”

“
Well, I haven’t given up yet, cupcake.”

“
Ooh,” said Carlos, “cupcake.”

W
e all laughed at that, easing the blanket of doom that stoked our fears. I was about to suggest we find a place to freshen up and maybe look for something to eat, when Tony looked out into the street and uttered, “Uh-oh?”

“
Uh-oh, what?”

“Isn’t that the old barkeep heading this way?”

“Tiny?”

“Yeah.”

I poked my head around Tony’s broad shoulders to have a look. “The same Tiny whose bar we burned to the ground?”

“Ah-huh
, and he’s got company. Six alphadytes.”

“
Is Tiny smiling?” asked Carlos.

“
Hard to say, does gritting one’s teeth constitute a smile?”

“Not if
one is still wearing pants,” I said.

“
He’s wearing pants.”

“
Crap.” I clapped my hands and rubbed them against the side of my jeans. “I think we’re done here, folks. The best advice I have for everyone now is... RUN!”

We
tore off through the back of the alley, finding temporary refuge in the town’s livery barn, a two-story wooden structure consisting of four stalls and a loft.

One
stall at the far end housed a strange-looking donkey-like creature with four legs and two heads, one on each end of the animal. The other three stalls were empty, save for random piles of manure and mounds of hay.

Carlos
pointed at the unusual beast. “Damn! What is that?”

“
It’s a double-headed donkey,” I said, as if such a sight was an everyday occurrence.

“
It’s stupid then, isn’t it?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just look. It has its heads up its ass.” He laughed. “Get it? Donkey. Ass. Huh?”

“Yeah, Carlos.
We get it.”

“
This way they come!” cried Ursula, retreating to the third stall.

We
followed her and scrambled to bury ourselves under the mounds of loose hay. Moments later, two alphadytes busted in. They rooted around in the first stall, slashing through the hay mounds with their massive claws.

Finding nothing, they moved on to the second.

At one point, a pitchfork leaning between the second and third stall fell over. It clipped a fence board, narrowly missing Ursula’s leg. She gasped and let out a tiny squeak before covering her mouth to squelch it. The first alphadyte didn’t hear it. The second one did.

W
ith a grunt, it directed the other to circle the back end of the stall while he covered the front, effectively cutting off any chance for our escape.

At that point, I knew we were dead. I expected Tony and Carlos
would put up a good fight, but taking on two alphadytes bare handed in any world is suicide.

I thought of jumping out of the hay and zapping them with zip balls, but the static energy I needed to do that just wasn’t there. The barn was a dead zone, in more ways than one.

After careful consideration, I decided to do what any red-blooded witch would do in my shoes. I would stand by my man and fight. The instant Tony and Carlos sprang from hiding,
I would do the same. With luck, it might buy the chance for Ursula and Leona to make a break and get away.

The door
latch clicked. The gate opened slowly on creaking hinges. A rustling of claws pawing at hay followed. The first jab narrowly missed Tony. The second skimmed off Carlos’ armored shoulder plate.

We were about to spring into action, hoping
maybe we’d take them by surprise, startle them perhaps, though alphadytes don’t startle easily, when someone in the next stall spoke.

“Yo, big guys! You come!”

The two quickly turned to investigate.

“I donkey,” said the voice. “You come here. I tell you secret.
Make you hero.”

They took the bait and edged closer to the stall.

“Dat right. Come closer. You look for strangers?”

Carlos whispered in my ear. “That’s Jerome.” I shut him up with a classic nipple pinch.

“They hide in field,” said Jerome, “behind warehouse. You go now. You catch them. Big reward.”

It almost worked.
They both started to leave when the larger one stopped and loped back to the stall. He stared at the donkey, hesitated, and then sniffed the air. The other joined him. They circled about, grunting and snorting through their curiosity.