Fallen Reign (Sins of the Father 1)

Quill scoffed, pretending to be annoyed by the boisterousness. But his smile somehow turned even smugger.

I’m pretty sure I figured out Quilliam J. Abernathy’s middle initial. The J stands for jerk.

31

I barely took the time to park Quill’s car, pulling up as close to the sidewalk as possible, then hauling ass right out of the driver’s seat. Florian and Quill followed closely behind. They probably suspected exactly as I did. Things worked differently in the arcane underground. Dead things don’t always stay dead, especially when they’re dedicated servants of deities of the underworld.

My fists hurt as I banged wildly on the front doors of the Rodriguez house. Who cared that it was past midnight? This could very well have been a matter of life and death. All we needed to do was hand Monica the peineta with Leonora’s hair in it. Then the younger Rodriguez would take care of everything, preferably by laying her grandmother to her final rest, where she would be way too dead to be interested in trying to kill me and the boys.

The door flew open and I sprang back. Monica Rodriguez, wearing a negligee, a fierce scowl, and very little else, stared wild-eyed at us from the threshold, one hand gripping white-knuckled over the haft of a knife, the other clutching what could have been a pointy chopstick, but was far more likely some kind of magic wand.

“What the hell do you want?” she rasped. We’d woken her up, clearly, as evidenced by the disarray of her hair and the groggy, distant look in her eyes. “Do you idiots know what time it is?”

I pushed past her, Florian and Quill filing in with me, and I slammed the door shut, apologetically nudging Monica out of the way. “We wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important,” I said hurriedly. “Oh. This is Florian.”

Florian lifted a hand. “Hi.”

Monica shot both of us confused, irritated glares.

“And this is your grandmother’s hair,” I said, handing her the ornamental comb. Monica’s eyes went huge at the sight of it. “Now, could you please deal with her? You never mentioned that she was going to fly off the handle and come chase us down if we tried to

steal her hair.”

She looked between the three of us, held the peineta to her chest, then rushed towards the kitchen. “Come quickly. We have to end this. Now.”

Monica moved like lightning. Within moments, she’d laid out a large, ornate bowl and a prayer candle, setting her knife next to them. She’d also extracted what looked like a round tupperware filled with – God, was that blood?

“Pig’s blood,” she said to no one in particular. “Comes in handy for rituals.” She uncovered the tub and threw the whole thing into the microwave.

I patted my hands along my shoulders, wondering why my back was so cold. Sweat was drying against my shirt. I was more freaked out than I thought. “Is all this really necessary? Leonora was genuinely just chasing us through the streets.” I clapped my hands for emphasis. “She was flying after us. Flying.”

“Plus I set her on fire,” Quill said, “but I’m not sure that was enough. Dropped her out of the sky, sure, but I’m willing to bet she’s still alive.”

“It’s her bond to the Lady,” Monica said. “Grandma might have fallen out of favor with our goddess, but that doesn’t mean she’s lost all ties to the underworld. She won’t be that easy to kill.”

Monica was picking through the peineta, pulling out wispy gray strands of her grandmother’s hair. She collected a bundle of dry twigs from a drawer – whether they were weird-looking sticks of cinnamon or some kind of bark, I couldn’t really tell. The workings of witches differed depending on their cultures, traditions, and even families. I wasn’t sure what Monica was doing, exactly, but I knew that the goal was to neutralize Leonora, maybe even kill her.

The kitchen filled with the overpowering smell of hot blood. Florian sneezed, then retched. I pulled my shirt up over my nostrils. Quill wrinkled his nose, but otherwise seemed unbothered, probably because he was more accustomed to arcane work than the two of us.

Monica pulled the tub out of the microwave and poured it into the bowl, careful to avoid spilling even a single bead of blood. She crushed a dried leaf, sprinkling its contents over the bowl, then cut the tip of her finger with the knife, adding her own blood to the mixture.

“And now, the final touch,” she said, her voice quivering with anticipation, perhaps a bit of fear and reverence.

She touched the tip of her wand to the bundle of sticks and hair in her hand, then to the prayer candle, setting both alight. Monica whispered a string of words that I recognized as Spanish, part of it a prayer, part of it a curse. The twigs and hair burned to a pile of blackened ashes in the palm of her hand, which again went into the mixture. With her wand, Monica stirred once, twice. Then she lifted the bowl in one hand.

I was not expecting her to throw its contents directly at my face.

My eyes went huge, my reflexes failing me as time itself seemed to stand still. The blood spilled from the bowl in every radial direction, almost as if it were sentient, guided by Monica’s power into the shape of an ever-widening circle. Larger and larger it grew. I couldn’t have escaped it even if I tried to run. And where could I run? By the time the blood hit the ground, it was shaped into a pool as big as the room itself.

I looked at my hands, my clothes, marveling at how the seemingly massive quantity of blood had sprayed everywhere but on my body. I glowered at Monica, my mind still working its way around this sudden betrayal. “You missed,” I growled.

Monica tilted her head and grinned in a way that made my insides shiver.

“Oh. Did I? Look again.”

The blood hadn’t fallen onto the floor in puddles like I’d expected. Instead it had splashed into the shape of a perfect ring. I watched in slowly increasing horror as the blood began to run in rivulets into a series of sigils and glyphs. A sealing circle. I willed my legs to move, but couldn’t. I forced my hands to lift, so they could accept something, anything that my spirit could call from out of the Vestments – but all my limbs were locked in place.

Florian was the first to attempt to step into the circle, but an invisible force shoved him back, as if the ring around me was only the base of some durable unseen wall. Quill’s attempt was subtler. He slammed his open palm against thin air, and the collision of his hand with the field produced a hollow, ringing thump. Monica had locked me in.