BURY THE WITCH: Book 10 (Detective Marcella Witch's Series) Read online

  BURY THE WITCH

  DANA E. DONOVAN

  This book is based entirely on fiction and its story line derived solely from the imagination of its author. No characters, places or incidents in this book are real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, events or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be copied, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy or otherwise without the express written permission of the author or author’s agent.

  Dana E. Donovan © 2014

  Cover art Vickie Donovan © 2014

  Special thanks to June Nicholson at

  June’s proofreading and copy editing service

  https://www.facebook.com/junesproofreading

  Books in this series include :

  The Witch’s Ladder

  Eye of the Witch

  The Witch’s Key

  Bones of a Witch

  Witch House

  Kiss the Witch

  Call of the Witch

  Gone is the Witch

  Return of the Witch

  Bury the Witch

  Other books by Dana E. Donovan:

  Abandoned

  Death and Other Little Inconveniences

  Resurrection

  Skinny

  Chapter 1

  I climbed onto the jetty and planted my hands on my hips. She was facing the water when she spoke, something about a phone. I said something back. She spun about, dropped her shoulders but raised her guard. Uncertainty dimmed her smile, while confusion stole her confidence and filled her with mistrust.

  I found that amusing and smiled at her. Her instincts kicked in. Caution whispered in her ear. Doubt acknowledged and agreed. She cupped her hands to her eyes and sized me through a squint. I nodded. She wasn’t buying.

  Overhead, a laughing gull protested my presence with a screech, warning me that my fragile welcome had worn itself thin. Lilith didn’t notice. I didn’t care.

  The wind shifted. Conversations from the beach bar carried across the water, as patrons hoisted sunset shooters and toasted the mundane. There, the music played so loud it quelled the pounding surf. This, too, she ignored, but for echoes of uncertainty, nothing else mattered.

  I pushed my sunglasses up and gave her a wink.

  She clutched the fold of her collar, staggered back and gasped. A wave rolled in behind her, breaking against the rock and dousing her in spray. She shook it off, uncaring. It was then I saw the confirmation in her eyes, as her apprehensions waned. Her lips parted but surrendered nothing. Whatever words she hoped to say had found a better place unsaid.

  I held my arms out to receiver her.

  “Tony?” she whispered, or maybe only mouthed it.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that really you?”

  “Yes, Lilith.” My smile widened. “It’s really me.”

  “T….” Her bottom lip quivered. “Tony!”

  She ran to me, crying, or laughing, or both; I couldn’t tell which. I held her tightly, my heart pounding, my knees weak. My throat constricted. I could hardly breathe, but I didn’t care. I had her in my arms again. Finally, she was mine once more.

  “Lilith,” I said, nestling my face in the tangle of her wind-whipped hair. Lilith, how that name lay perched upon my lips through a thousand endless nights. It felt so good to hold her, to live a dream I thought I’d never see come true.

  “Tony,” she whispered, palming my chest and leaning her head back to examine my withered face, my beard and wild wavy hair. She took it all in with an eye of wonder and bemusement. All the while, I held her tightly, my fingers stitched through the belt loops of her jeans. I studied her eyes, her rich, dark, ebony eyes. How they drilled me, peering into my soul, searching for answers I knew she’d not find.

  “Tony,” she said again, only louder. Her jaw clenched. Her eyelids narrowed. Her brows gathered in angry folds. “You son of a bitch!”

  I reeled back. “Excuse me?”

  She raised her hand and slapped me across the face. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I let her go. She stepped back, but remained within arm’s reach.

  “I thought you were dead.” She landed several more blows to both sides of my face, stinging slaps made worse by salty sea spray. “We all thought you were dead!” Her tears began free falling. “How could you do that to us? To me!”

  “Lilith, I…I—”

  She completely wigged out then, striking me repeatedly, wildly, smacking me across the cheek, chin, temples, eyes, nose, forehead and anywhere else an open-hand slap could land in a frenzied fit of blind rage. She knocked the sunglasses off my head and kept slapping.

  “You bastard! I thought I lost you!” Her blows fell to my chest, closed-fisted punches landing as hard as she could throw them. “We all thought you were dead! We thought you were…were….”

  Except for half words and garbled syllables, that was all I could make out after that. I let her beat me like a tom-tom until she wore herself out and collapsed back into my arms. She surrendered, tears-spent and exhausted. I held her close, pressing her cheek to my chest.

  “Shhh...” I cooed, caressing her hair, and to her silent sobbing I, too, surrendered, allowing the warmth of her body to melt the ice in my soul.

  “Tony...”

  “Shhh, it’s okay,” I said, hushing her tears. It’s strange, I know, but I never wanted that moment to end. I understood then just how much she loved me, how incredibly deep her pain was. The entire time I was gone, I thought she knew where I was. She hadn’t a clue.

  I cradled her in my arms and swayed to the rhythm of the surf. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “I’m home now.”

  Chapter 2

  On the drive back to New Castle, I asked Lilith where she wanted me to begin, though I knew the ride was long enough for me to cover everything I might wish to talk about and more.

  “You can begin by telling me why you aren’t dead,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s a good place to start.”

  “Well?” She turned the car south on 128 and settled in for the ride home.

  “I’m not dead because I didn’t die,” I said, simply.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m getting to that. You remember the night at the research center, how I ran back into the building to get your witch’s key?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought I had plenty of time. On the first run out of the building, I counted only ten seconds. That’s how long it took to run from the room, down the stairs and out the door. Ten seconds flat.”

  “So?”

  “So I thought I could do it again. The trouble was, by the time I found the damn key and showed it to you through the window, the fuse on the dynamite had burned down to a two-inch nub. I knew I only had about three seconds before it blew.”

  “Then I’ll ask you again. Why aren’t you dead?”

  “Because I went back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back to the Eighth Sphere.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Lilith, I could see that I’d run out of time. I turned around and my only option was staring me right in the face. Literally.”

  “Of course!” She smacked the steering wheel with the heel of her palm. “The mirror. You went back through the portal by jumping through the mirror.”

  “I did, and just barely. The force of the explosion rippled all the way through to the Eighth Sphere. It shot me out of the portal like a cannon. Shook the entire town
.”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. No wonder they never found so much as a piece of you.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t think of it either. Frankly, I assumed you were working on a way to rescue me the whole time.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I wasn’t.”

  “You’re sorry.”

  “So, that’s where you’ve been all this time?”

  “Yes, it was a long five years but I never gave up. Just the thought of seeing you again kept me going.”

  “Tony.”

  “I mean, that’s not to say there weren’t times when I thought I’d never make it out.”

  “Tony, you weren’t—”

  “Still, that’s not the same as giving up. You know I have to say I owe it all to Jerome. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know what I would have—”

  “Tony!”

  “What?”

  She pulled the car to the side of the road and put it in park. I knew then, whatever she had to tell me was big. Yet I knew that Carlos, Dominic and Ursula were still alive, so it wasn’t that. I turned in my seat to face her. As I looked into her eyes, I swallowed back the lump in my throat and readied myself for the news.

  “Tony, you haven’t been gone five years.”

  “Oh. No, of course. I know it wasn’t exactly five years. I mean you know how hard it is to judge time in that place. But it’s close, I know, because Jerome and I developed a system of measuring time. It works on the same principle as the hourglass. You see, I realized that the one constant in that entire stinking universe was gravity. Therefore, by filling these vertical chambers with sand, Jerome and I were able to—”

  “Tony.” She put her finger to my lips to stop me. “I’m sure you and Jerome built a fine instrument for telling time there, but the truth is that it still doesn’t carry over to this universe. It may have been five years for you in the Eighth Sphere, and believe me, the thought of that breaks my heart, but back here you’ve only been gone five weeks.”

  “F….” I felt my jaw go slack to the point that I couldn’t even finish the word. I tried again. “Five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weeks?”

  “Yes, Tony. Weeks. I’m sorry.”

  I turned back in my seat and drew a blank stare out the window. I couldn’t believe it. Everything I’d gone through, the hardships, the battles, the endless freezing night followed by more endless freezing nights. The decussate events. How many had there been? Dozens? Hundreds? I couldn’t count them all.

  I thought of how many creatures I had killed and eaten; how many had nearly killed and eaten me. Then there were the malodytes, how many had I slain? It seemed impossible that I could kill so many in a mere five weeks. Hell, I thought she was going to tell me I was gone so much longer.

  Five weeks.

  I survived a wretched lifetime in the time it took most people to make another car payment. The moon had barely cycled five quarters. Carlos probably still had milk in his fridge that old.

  Five weeks.

  I thought of the lonely nights I lay awake, thinking of Lilith, missing her, wanting her. One-thousand-seven-hundred-eighty nights, by my calculations. Why?

  “Tony?” Lilith touched my arm.

  I looked back at her. Her eyes glistened with the promise of tears, but they had not yet found life. She could feel my pain. I knew it. Only then could I feel hers. She thought I was dead. How much pain had she endured believing it? How much torment had she suffered? I knew then, I would not have traded my five years for her five weeks, not for anything in this world or any other.

  “Lilith,” I said, but that’s all I had.

  She whispered back softly. “It’s all right, Tony. I’ll help you through this.”

  She put the car in drive and eased back into traffic. After a few miles of silence, I skipped the five years of fateful consequence and told her how I got back.

  “I looked for cycles,” I told her.

  “What, like bicycles?”

  “No, like rhythms in nature, recurring events with predictable patterns.”

  “I didn’t think the Eighth Sphere had predictable patterns.”

  “It doesn’t really, but there is a consistency associated with irregular recurring events, such as the decussate, or as Jerome calls it, Decussaday. I learned early that the reason we found portals so easily prior to us leaving the Eighth Sphere together was that they tend to open up with greater frequency during the decussate event. It’s sort of a high-tide phenomenon, if you will. The problem is that the opening of a particular portal type or location isn’t constant or predictable. Just because you know where to look for one, doesn’t mean it will open for you on the next decussate. That phenomenon appears to be completely random.

  “For as long as I was there, I spent every available moment searching for portals, logging their active cycles, figuring out ways to determine where they went, how I could map them and whether or not I could predict their next occurrence. The interesting thing about it is that, although portals come and go, their connection routs never change. Once you know where to look for one, it’s simply a matter of waiting for it to open up for you.”

  “Is that what you did with the portal that took you back here?”

  “No. That one I found by chance.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s my own brand of string theory. See, once I located a portal, I would tie an object to a long vine and feed it through. It’s sort of like fishing with a sinker. Just toss it in, wait a while and then pull it back. If it’s charred, I found a volcano or a fire pit, or some other hell spot I’d rather not visit. If it came back frozen, wet, slimy or eaten, I knew I didn’t want to bother with that one either.

  “But, if it came back intact, none the worse for wear and tear, then I figured it might be some place worth checking out.”

  “And that worked for you?” she asked.

  “Sometimes no, but thanks to Jerome, we always managed to fend for ourselves all right.”

  “Wow. I bet you miss the little snot, don’t you?”

  “Uh…yeah,” I said, and left it at that.

  “So tell me how you found the portal home?”

  I raised my shoulders and dropped them easily. “Like I said, it was dumb luck. For years, or weeks, as I suppose the case is now, Jerome and I kept going back to the stables, the last place we knew the portal home to be. It took forever before I finally accepted that it wasn’t there anymore. The explosion at the research center had closed it down for good. I just didn’t want to admit it.

  “Anyway, after the first year or so, we only journeyed back to town during the decussate, assuming that’s the only time we might find another portal home, if ever.”

  “Wait. You never went into town any other time?”

  “No, no, no. Town was just too dangerous, especially for Jerome. No, we did okay out in the woods.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “It was during the last decussate that we were heading into town. Jerome and I were fooling around, chucking stones at each other. Next thing we knew, one of the stones disappeared.”

  “It fell through a portal?”

  “That’s what we figured. It was just another portal. After all, it was the height of the decussate event. There were all sorts of portals opening up everywhere. Yet, this one was different.”

  “How so?”

  “Something about the way it rippled. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain, but after you’ve checked out as many portals as we had, you start to see the little nuances between them. Since we hadn’t investigated that particular one before, we figured what the hell. We fashioned a line out of a bunch of vines, tied an Eighth Sphere version of a pinecone around one end and tossed it in.

  “Almost immediately, I felt a tug.” I demonstrated an imaginary line in my hand twitching as though I had a fish nibbling on a hook. “I gave it a quick jerk, and lo and behold. What do you think I had?”

  Lilith shrugged. �
�A fish?”

  “No. A squirrel.”

  “A squirrel? I didn’t know there were squirrels there.”

  “There isn’t. That’s how I knew I had found the portal back home.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “I know, right?” I started laughing with the same sense of giddiness I had when I first discovered the portal.

  “So,” she said, “what did you do with it?”

  I stopped laughing to address her question. “Do with what? The portal?”

  “No, the squirrel.”

  “Oh, that. We ate it.”

  “What?”

  I suddenly felt very guilty of something, though I wasn’t sure what or why. “I said we ate it.”

  “Tony, no.”

  “Lilith, yes. Come on, really? What the hell? Five years. That’s how long I was there. I know you think it was only five weeks, but that’s not the time frame I experienced. I don’t want to tell you about some of the things I’ve eaten; things I’ve had to eat to stay alive. I’m talking about insects, rodents, slimy things that crawl, fly and ooze out of other dead things. There were times when I was so hungry, god help me, I’m not proud to say this, but I even thought about eating Jerome to survive.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Of course not. It’s a damn good thing, too, because if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be alive today. He’s the one that showed me what I could eat, what I couldn’t, what worked best to stave off infections, where to find water when water was nowhere to be found. No, I didn’t eat him, but I sure as hell ate that squirrel, and it was good. I don’t regret it.”

  She grew quiet then, perhaps sulking because I snapped at her. I hoped not, though. I hoped she pulled back because she knew I was right. Hell, if she only knew the half of it, the things I had to do to survive in that godforsaken lawless hellhole.

  If she only knew.

  We were almost to New Castle when she brought up the homecoming again, specifically the part where my feet touched the hallowed ground of planet earth once more.