Play with Fire

chapter Twenty-Five

THERON WARE AND his crew had rented a house in Billings Montana. The contract he’d signed was for a year, but they would be gone inside two weeks. Cheap motel rooms were all very well most of the time, but now Ware had some magic to work, and he needed space and privacy.

Billings was over one hundred miles from Sheridan Wyoming, which was to be the site of their next sacrifice. But all the towns anywhere near Sheridan, on both sides of the border, were tiny – certainly small enough so that a group like Ware’s might be noticed, and remembered later. The Billings metro area, on the other hand, contained over half a million people. It was easy to disappear in a place that size.

Ware had set up his equipment in the basement, and the scrying spell he’d been preparing was almost ready to go. He heard footsteps thumping down the stairs, and a moment later Elektra came into view, wearing the flannel shirt and ancient jeans that were her standard attire.

He had found Elektra Hamilton in a girls reform school two years ago, when she was seventeen. She’d been in the children’s prison (for that is what a reform school is) for a year already, sent there for starting the fire that burned down her house, killing her parents and baby sister. When she turned eighteen, the court had decreed, she was to be transferred to a women’s correctional facility, there to spend the next twenty to thirty years contemplating the enormity of her crimes.

Elektra had protested volubly at her trial that the fire was a terrible accident, and that she’d had no intention of hurting anybody. But once Ware had helped her escape and she had joined his little band, her explanation was considerably more terse: “The f*ckers deserved it.” Even her nine-year–old sister, Ware had asked, who’d suffered from spina bifida? “Especially her, the whiny little cunt.”

Reaching the bottom of the basement stairs, Elektra asked, “Whatcha doing?

“Preparing to do a little scrying,” he told her.

“Yeah? Who you lookin’ for?”

“That man and woman I told you about. The ones we read about online last week.”

“Oh, yeah. That investigator guy and his buddy, the witch. Think he’s f*cking her?”

“I wouldn’t presume to know, or care, my dear. But if the scrying should reveal any intimate details of their lives, I’ll be sure to share them with you.”

“Yeah, okay. Um, the guys and me were gonna take the van and check out some of the strip clubs downtown. That okay?”

“Fine – just don’t do anything stupid. If you get yourselves arrested – for any reason – you will cease to be of use to me. Understand?

She brought up her hands in a placating gesture. “Yeah, sure, don’t worry. We even got a designated driver – Jeremy. I promised to buy him a lap dance from some cunt in one of the clubs, if he just drinks coke all evening.”

“Very wise, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, well, you want anything before I go – a blowjob, or maybe a quick f*ck? I could bend over that workbench thing there, if you want.”

“No thank you, my dear. You run along with the others and have a good time. But be back by sunrise, or I shall become quite vexed with you, understand?”

Elektra unconsciously took a step back. She knew what “vexed” could mean with this man. He sometimes scared her worse than her father ever had. “Sure, we’ll be back long before then – I promise.”

“All right then, I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Okay – see ya.”

He was glad the children, as he sometimes thought of them, were leaving for a while. Scrying took a great deal of concentration, and that required silence.

Ware filled the dark blue basin he’d bought at Target with water, within an inch of the brim. Then he dropped in small amounts of rosemary, belladonna, and earth from a baby’s grave that he had harvested himself the day before, being forced to use a blowtorch on the frozen ground.

He closed his eyes, gradually cleared his mind of extraneous thoughts, then addressed the one he thought of as his spirit guide.

O Lord Asmodeus, give me sight.

O Lord Asmodeus, give me vision.

Give me the power to see beyond these walls.

Give me power to see your enemies, who are also my enemies.

Let me see the dwelling places of your enemies, the man Quincey Harker Morris and the woman, Elizabeth Catherine Chastain. Let me know their whereabouts and their movements.

Then let me destroy them.

Ware slowly passed his left hand, palm down, over the water five times, then waited. Slowly, images began to appear on the surface of the water. Images of a city at night. Images that moved. He stared at what was being revealed to him, glancing occasionally at the photos he’d downloaded from the internet of a man with black hair and a heavy beard, and a woman with brown hair and eyes the color of arctic seas.

In a few minutes, he saw what he was looking for.

He had found them. And they were together.