Film, motion, chanting.
Light, movement, sound.
He felt a bit tipsy, as if he’d done a line of tequila shots.
The image flickered. One quick second, the blinking of an eye, and a pillar of smoke began to emerge in front of the screen.
It coalesced with astonishing quickness, and although the smoke was black, Tristán saw flashes of silver among its threads. He didn’t know how smoke could have threads, of all things, but this apparition seemed to be soot, mist, and sinews. It gave the impression of both muscularity and vapor; it recalled the contours of a human body.
On the screen Ewers’s silver pendant glittered.
“Give me your hands, dearest brother and sister, for now we call upon the Lords of Air, the Princes in Yellow, to witness our rites.”
Behind Tristán the cultists parroted the lines. Clarimonde seemed to practically scream hers, gazing at the screen in adoration. Montserrat had dipped her stick in the blood again. She raised her head, pausing. Her eyes sought him.
Tristán nodded.
Montserrat made a quick motion with the stick, tracing a rune. A second later, a solitary spark lit the corner of the room before flames jumped up and began gnawing at the screen.
Three things happened at once. The crowd, which had been happily babbling and holding their hands up in the air, began to protest, pointing and yelling at the spreading flames. The pillar of smoke that had been coalescing in front of the screen grew faint. Clarimonde yelled, motioning to the men with the dogs. They rushed toward Montserrat, their hands wrapped around the dogs’ leashes, and she stepped back quickly, the stick in her hands. José López had faced off against the dogs like that, but she wasn’t López. Tristán thought of following her, even of grabbing one of those creatures with his bare hands and punching it, but the pain in his head increased. He fell to his knees and clutched the back of his skull, digging his fingers against his skin.
He heard a sound, a high-pitched wailing, or static, a noise that was not words although he could hear a faint murmur. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Runes.
“Abel,” he whispered. “Is that you?”
Yes.
Tristán stood up, shaking, one hand still pressed against the back of his head. He moved toward the spot where Montserrat had been standing. There were six runes on the floor, the same as Tristán had drawn during the séance, except the last one was the fire rune instead of Ewers’s vegvísir. That was missing and must be traced for the sequence to be correct. He bent down, wiped the fire rune with his foot, and stared at the floor.
“I can’t remember how to draw it,” he told Abel. “And I have nothing to draw it with. Hey, are you there?”
Abel did not reply. Fuck. He’d worry about the silence later. Tristán turned around looking for a tool, something he could use, while on the screen Wilhelm Ewers smiled.
* * *
—
Montserrat’s heart was beating fast. With one hand she carefully traced a rune, while she pressed a hand against her throat with the other, her fingers settling on the spot where Ewers had touched her. He’d been right, she could feel it, there—power, coiled tight, tainted with death. Or perhaps enhanced by it. Power in the blood she smeared on the floor. It seemed to go from the silver point of the stick up the wooden handle and tickled her hands.
She’d felt sick in the car, almost faint, but now she was wildly alert. The encounter with Ewers had sharpened her senses. This is how he felt, she thought, when he cast his spells and wove his complex conjurations.
Air, earth, water, life, the opener. Her movements were elegant. Both prints were playing in smooth synchronized motion; the dialogue echoed around the room. She paid little heed to it, or to the cultists who chanted in unison. The runes held her attention.
Then she paused, breathing in slowly. Tristán’s voice had started playing. He was reciting Ewers’s lines. She saw Ewers on the screen, with his gleaming, treacherous eyes, and turned her head, seeking Tristán.
He was staring at her, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she looked at his familiar face, those mismatched eyes, one narrower, placed a fraction higher than the other, and the scar from the accident she couldn’t see in the dark but that she knew was there.
The sight of his face, the sound of his voice, jolted her back to the reality of the ballroom, of the night thick with the scent of magic. She drew the sixth rune, but conjured fire instead, wishing for it, willing it forward. Ordering flames and heat to manifest.
They did. Fire tore through the screen, like a mirror that cracked, tracing a spidery line of golds and reds. There was power in death, in blood, as Ewers had said. Power that lingered and could be re-formed, directed, and she took that feeling of might and hurled it at the screen.
She clamped her hands tight around the stick, expecting a reprisal, and within seconds the attack came. Two men stepped forward, their hands wrapped around leashes, charging forward with their dogs.
When a dog lunged at her, she hit it hard. The tip of the stick sunk into the dog’s skin as if it were made of tar, and the animal turned its head, viciously snapping at the wood. The other dog went for Montserrat’s leg, fangs sinking into her thin, atrophied ankle.
The pain was tremendous; the fangs were sharp even if the dog was not a real animal, but a dreadful mix of magic and illusions. Her eyes watered, and she opened her mouth, but she recalled Clarimonde’s living room. Reflect, she thought. Not outrun.
At Clarimonde’s house she’d had charcoal to draw with, and here she had nothing.
No, not quite.
One dog savaged the wooden stick, chomping at it, and she kicked the other dog away, though the motion ruined her balance. When she fell back on the floor she still had a free hand, and her fingers glided quickly in the air, tracing a rune.
Fire, she thought again, as she’d thought about it only seconds before, setting the screen ablaze.
Almost immediately the two dog handlers burst into flames, crowned in fire, and whirled around in shock. The dogs evaporated while the men rolled and screamed on the floor. Montserrat groaned. She sat up only to find Clarimonde moving in her direction, clutching her knife.
Montserrat managed to trace another fire rune, but Clarimonde grinned fiercely and returned the rune with another motion of her own. Montserrat’s fingers burned, as if she’d touched a candle’s flame, instead of affecting Clarimonde.
“Fuck,” she said. Montserrat managed to stand up, using the stick to help her steady her limbs. Magic was a quick-burning fuel, one second whipping through your body, then draining you. She could feel the power that she’d wielded only seconds before already receding. The boost blood and death had given her were evaporating. Beneath that there remained a charge she could access, the force that both she and Tristán had been using all this while: the infectious energy of Ewers’s spell. Of Ewers himself, although this too seemed to almost be wavering, as if Ewers were angrily clawing at it. Perhaps because he needed this reserve of energy in order to manifest in the room, or maybe because he wished to stop them from ruining his plans.
Montserrat, weakening, could only grasp the stick like a baseball bat and swing it at Clarimonde as she approached. Swing left, and right, in an attempt to force her to stay back. Clarimonde laughed and held an elegant hand forward, pressing it against her chin, and opened her mouth, as if blowing cigarette smoke in her direction. A strong gust of wind shoved Montserrat. It made the chandelier above their heads tinkle and blew out the simmering flames that were chomping at the screen as easily as if they were birthday candles.