Magic Steals (Kate Daniels #6.5)(9)

He gave me another flat Jim look.

We walked to the door. I put the key in, turned it, and swung the door open. The house lay before us, dark and cold. A faint stench of carrion drifted through the air. Jim shifted his stance, falling into that loose, ready pose that meant he was ready for something to leap on him and try to rip his neck open. I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and let my power roll in a wave from me.

Jim snarled.

I opened my eyes. Viscous, fetid magic dripped from the walls all around us, sliding along the panels, translucent and dappled with blotches of darkness.

“What the hell is this?” he growled.

“This is you dipping a toe into my world. Stay close, Jim.”

The walls near the door were lighter, the foul magic patina thinner, but at the end of the hallway, the magic grew thick. I could see the open kitchen window from where I stood, and the dark slime pouring through the frame into the house. Whatever it was came from the backyard.

Small fang-studded mouths formed in the slimy magic, stretching toward me. Jim jerked his knife out. It was huge, dark grey, with a curved tip and serrated metal teeth near the handle.

I took a deep breath and raised my hands, my movements slow and graceful, hands bent back, fingers wide apart, trembling.

The evil magic paused, unsure.

In my head the bamboo flutes sang, with the metallic sounds of the xylophone setting the beat. I opened my eyes wide, bent my knees, my toes up off the floor, and turned. Magic pulsed from my body. The slime around us evaporated, as if burned off by an invisible fire. Bright sunlight spread in a wave, rolling over the walls, floor, and ceiling purging the rot. It cleared the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and slid over the window frame. The dark slime dropped out of sight.

Weird.

“Holy shit,” Jim said.

I frowned. “This is wrong.”

“What do you mean wrong? That was fucking unbelievable.”

“Usually when a house is this corrupted, the magic is deeply rooted. It should’ve taken more than two dance steps to clear it. I don’t understand this. There is so much corruption, but it’s all really shallow.”

I marched to the kitchen and opened the door to the back porch. The backyard opened onto a stretch of woods. A wrought iron fence separated the grass from the trees, a narrow gate ajar. The foul magic hovered between the trees, coating the bark, dripping, and waiting. It felt me and slithered deeper into the woods.

Where are you going? Don’t run. We’re just starting.

I crossed the grass, walked through the open gate, and kept going into the forest, Jim right behind me. The magic streamed away from me. I chased it down a path between the massive oaks. The same scent I had smelled on the coarse hair in my kitchen filled my nostrils: dry, acrid, bitter scent. Almost there.

The path ducked under the canopy of braided tree limbs bound together by kudzu. I followed it, moving fast through the natural tunnel of leaves and branches. The green tunnel opened into a clearing. A massive tree must’ve fallen here and taken a neighbor or two with it. Three giant trunks lay on the grass. The surrounding trees and kudzu laid claim to the light, greedy for every stray photon, and the leaves filled the space high above us, turning the sunlight watery and green. The air smelled wrong, tainted with decay. It was like being in the bottom of a really deep, scum-infested well.

Eyang Ida sat on the trunk. Her skin had a sickly grey tint, her eyes glassy and opened wide. She stared right at me, but I didn’t think she could see me. The magic swirled around her, so thick, it was almost opaque black.

I stopped. Jim paused behind me.

“Is that her?”

“It’s her.” I raised my hand to stop him if he tried to go to her, but he didn’t move. He really did trust me. I had asked him to stay close and he followed my lead.

Ferns rustled to the left of me and a creature stepped into my view. About ten inches tall, it looked like a tiny human, with dark brown skin, two legs and two arms. Long, coarse hair fell from its head all the way past its toes, dragging a couple of inches on the ground like a dark mantle. It stared at me with two amber eyes, each with a slit, dark pupil like the eyes of a blue temple viper, then it opened the wide slit of its mouth, showing two white fangs, and hissed.

“What is that?” Jim asked.

“A jenglot,” I said. Just like I thought. This was one of the traditional Indonesian horrors. Except that judging by the amount of magic in that house, there had to be more of them. A lot more. “It’s vampiric.”

Another jenglot crawled out onto the trunk. A third pair of eyes ignited in the hollow of a tree.

“It and its family stole Eyang Ida out of her house,” I said. “They will feed on her blood’s essence and when there is no more essence left, she’ll become one of them.”

The woods came alive with dozens of eyes. Big tribe, at least fifty creatures. I had expected fifteen, maybe twenty. But fifty? Fifty was bad.

“Are they hard to kill?”

“Yes. They are hardy. Setting them on fire helps.”

“There are a lot of them,” Jim said.

“Yes.”

“You might need some help . . .” Jim’s voice was very calm. He weighed our odds. The numbers weren’t in our favor.

With a soft whisper, a creature slithered onto Eyang Ida’s lap. If it had legs, this jenglot would stand at least a foot tall, with hair twice as long, but it had no legs. Instead it had a snake’s tail, long and brown, like the body of a spitting cobra. The royal jenglot.