But finally Heath was able to stop and look once more on the Witch’s Castle.

  It might once had had a peaked roof, but the roof was gone now. Only the stone remained. Two stories of fitted stone with two stone stairways leading up, one at each end. Arches where doors might have been, and three windows on each of the two peaked walls. The city had added a guard rail to keep anyone from falling back down to the trail, but the second floor wasn’t where the action was.

  The first floor had two rooms. One big and rectangular, little more than three walls and a stone floor. The other small and square, with an arched doorway. The smaller room was beloved of druggies. It smelled like pot year round, and today was no exception. And both rooms served as canvases for the spray-can aficionados. Both had layer after layer of tags and names and pentacles and more in a chaos of reds, silvers, whites, and blacks all over the walls and ceilings.

  The floors were oddly untouched.

  Heath and Colin collapsed on the untouched floor of the larger room – Heath trying unsuccessfully to convince himself that he didn’t smell old urine – while Nariko … climbed, or perched, or got ready to yodel for all Heath knew.

  All he really cared about at that moment was getting air into his sweaty, exhausted body. Even the stone floor felt comfortable enough to sleep on just then.

  “Heath…” said Colin, “why the fuck … are we here?”

  “You and me … don’t have ties … to land….”

  “Exactly.” Colin rolled over onto his side, his face flushed so bad it looked like a severe sunburn. He panted before he managed, “So why…”

  “Hills and mountains … Nariko … serious power bump…”

  “Fucking … better be…”

  “Honestly,” said Nariko, stepped just inside and out of the rain. “Just because neither of you hikes as often as you should—”

  “Fuck … you,” said Colin.

  Heath started to chuckle, which was difficult without breath. But it helped lighten the moment. Colin tried to snicker, seeming to let go some of his own angry frustration at the effort of getting here. Nariko just smiled and waited for the two of them to catch their breaths.

  Several minutes later, Heath was sitting up, sipping water from a bottle Nariko carried in her hiking bag, and munching on a handful of cashews and brazil nuts. Colin hadn’t sat up yet, but he had his own bottle of water waiting for his attention, and the bag of mixed nuts lay between them.

  “There is another reason,” Heath said, “for coming out here.”

  “Better be,” said Colin, though without as much venom as earlier.

  “How much advantage do we now have over anyone who tries to come interfere?”

  “Exactly,” said Nariko. “They’d have to good hikers or bikers – or just generally awesome like me – to get here and still have enough energy for a fight.”

  “Dirt bikes,” said Colin.

  “Noisiest things around,” said Heath. “And banned in the park. You better believe the neighbors would get the cops – or maybe it’s the rangers – out here to put a stop to it before they ruined the trails.”

  “Hope you’re right,” said Colin, cracking open his water bottle and taking a long swig.

  Heath hoped so too.

  Ten minutes later, Heath had stripped off his rain poncho and stashed it in the corner of the bigger stone room alongside Nariko’s and Colin’s. The corner that smelled least like old urine. Now he knelt in that corner and unzipped his backpack, his head deep in thoughts of herbs and incenses and ways he might draw on the connection between the bookmark and the book to bring the latter to him.

  “Let me do it, Heath,” said Colin. He stood beside Nariko just inside the missing wall that formed the only entrance into this room in the old ruined stone building. Lightning flashed behind him, showing Heath what his ears had kept assuring him – the rain continued to come down heavy. “You’re too close to the bookmark already. If you use it for magic—”

  “I risk tightening the bond. I know.” Heath shrugged. “But let’s face it, that’s the very reason it’s much more likely to work if I do it. And we may not get two shots at this. Our first attempt will alert at least some of our contenders – definitely my uncle – that we have the bookmark. We need this to work the first time or all the attacks that have been failing to reach us will start coming on strong.”

  Heath expected some comment from Nariko, but she looked only half there. Probably on the outskirts of a Shugendō meditation he’d seen before. Something she used to contact the spirit of a hill or mountain. Most of her attention was either inward or down.

  “I’m still not convinced that failure is our worst option,” said Colin, moving back and forth restlessly, despite clear fatigue. “And before you remind me what the Sybil said, just remember her prophecies don’t exactly come with a money-back guarantee. And the Greek tragedies are full of people trying to gain advantage through prophecy. Ask me how well it works out for them.”

  “I’ve read the classics,” said Heath, now digging around, but his hand not settling yet on so much as a candle. Were Colin’s words that distracting?

  “Then you know they end badly. Every one.”

  “Colin,” said Heath. He waited until Colin stopped fidgeting and looked at him. “I’m doing this. And I’m doing this now. You can either help me or meet me at the car.”

  “I’m trying to help,” he said softly. “But you’re not letting me.”

  Heath shook his head. “The book seems to be picky about who it goes to. Right now I’ve got the bookmark, which means I’ve got the edge. But if I let someone else do my magic for me? It sends the wrong message. Might undo everything we’ve been struggling for.”

  Colin looked away.

  “Colin,” said Heath slowly, “you don’t want the book. Do you?”

  “No,” Colin said too quickly. Then he looked over at Heath, chagrin on his face, but a light in his eye. “Not really. Not to use. But” – he put his whole body into a shrug that never reached his eyes – “I love grimoires. I’d love to add it to my collection, read it through once or twice…”

  Heath closed the distance between them in three quick steps and slapped Colin hard across the face, a sound that rang out from the close stones behind him.

  “Wake the fuck up,” said Heath. “Do your relaxation exercises or summon your Swami Force or whatever the hell it is that you do, but you get control of yourself right now.”

  Colin rubbed his cheek, his eyes damp with tears that told Heath his blow might have been a little harder than necessary. But Heath wasn’t sorry. Better to err on the side of caution than lose his friend.

  “You know as well as I do,” Heath said, “that this is no ordinary grimoire. It’s the goddamn unholy relic that once belonged to a goddamn saint. This is not something you can tuck away on a bookshelf and forget about, and if you doubt me ask yourself just how close you came to calling it the precious.”

  Colin blinked and looked down. He mumbled something, and though Heath couldn’t make out the words, he had no trouble interpreting the apology they contained.

  “I’m sorry too. I’m sorry I had to hit you. If you think I was wrong to do it, I’ll give you a free shot to my chin. Right now, or when all this is over.”

  Colin shook his head.

  “All right then. You need to get ready anyway, because if this works we’re going to get hit like the beach at Normandy. Right?”

  Colin nodded, and gave Heath a weak smile as he turned away.

  But something still bothered Heath about the way Colin moved. Too slow. More exhausted than even that trek should have made him.

  “Colin,” he said, “want me to cleanse you with incense? Just in case that book or bookmark has a hold of you?”

  “It does,” said Colin, “and I’ll get it. You need to focus on what you’re doing. The Amazing All-Cleaner will fix me right up. And if it doesn’t, I give Nariko permission to knock some sense into me.”

  Nariko didn’t turn at that, but Heath saw the set of her jaw change in her profile. Amusement?

  “You know she’s trained to hit people,” said Heath. “I mean, I can hit harder. But she will hit harder, you know?”

  “I know,” said Colin.

  And Heath realized that Colin meant it. His own little way of making sure he followed through on that cleansing rite. Fear of a good, solid punch.

  Heath tried to hide his smirk at that as he turned back to his bag of tricks. Only a man who’s never really been hit can be that afraid of a punch.

  And Heath had been hit more times than he liked to think about. Fortunately, he tended to give as good as he got.

  And as he looked at the contents of his bag and considered what he was about to do, Heath decided this had to be one of those times when he hit back just a little harder.

  To Heath, the real trick of hoodoo wasn’t learning what herbs were useful for what purposes, or how to blend the oils, or even how to talk to those herbs and roots so their little spirits would wake up and do the things he needed done.

  All of that came naturally, and Heath expected that the same could be said of anyone who took more than a step or two down the path of conjure.

  No, to Heath the real trick wasn’t understanding how to put together solutions. It was figuring out the problems themselves. Once Heath understood a problem, the solution looked pretty darned obvious. Need to break up a couple? Black Cat Oil would handle it in short order (and it only needed the hairs from the cat, and the cat could be alive and well and purring the whole time, thank you very much, Uncle Andre).

  Short of money? A little arrow root, used right, will bring in a quick gambling win that can keep creditors away and supply much-needed breathing room.

  But the case of the Black Book of Saint Cyprian just wasn’t as simple as all of that. Heath knew plenty of charms and workings to bring things to him, but most of those worked for a class of things. Any single copy of this mass-produced compact disc. Any old red Corvette that had just the right accessories in just the right condition.

  Specific, yes, but not exact. A Corvette like this one, not this very one.

  That wasn’t the case here. The book Heath had to call up was exactly one-of-a-kind, and it had at least some of its own magic to boot. Heck, if the Sybil was to be believed, the book itself might just be sentient and capable of making its own decisions.

  In that sense, Bend Over Oil might have been the way to go. Just reach out and compel that old grimoire to find its way to Heath under its own power. Control its will like controlling a boss who’s been refusing a raise to a deserving employee.

  But that didn’t feel quite right either. And what was more, Heath was more than certain that every two-bit caster with an ounce of magic in his pocket had to be flinging just about every spell he knew to try to grab this tome.

  At least, it certainly felt that way to Heath.

  So maybe a working wasn’t the answer here.

  Heath sat there in the middle of the cold stone floor of that room in the Witch’s Castle. Rain continued to come down like it was November and not July. The afternoon sky looked dark as evening even though the sun wasn’t due to set for hours.

  Nariko stood at the missing-wall entrance, her mind deep in conversation with the spirit of this hill, which was one of the bigger and older hill spirits in all of Forest Park. Colin stood just a few feet from her, his head deep in his own magic, which appeared to have cut him off from whatever urge had him starting to lust after the Black Book.

  For now, anyway. Once the book was here, who knew?

  Heath flared his nostrils in a long, deep inhalation of the sage incense smoking up from the bedpan. Using it to cleanse the room before getting started had been a good idea, but honestly Heath cared more about giving himself a break from the smells of pot, old urine, and wet foliage.

  There was old magic here. Heath could feel it in the strong, stone bones of this house. Maybe it had only been built as an outhouse – if the official story was to be believed – but Heath knew that the site had been used for magic many times. Maybe because of the power in the Douglas fir just behind the ruin, the biggest and oldest in Forest Park. Maybe because of the “ley lines” or whatever the people who studied the flow of power liked to call it.

  Back down in Louisiana, they would talk about the pwen of this place. A point of power. Thick as a bayou swamp, and maybe just as tricky. Heath could feel it in his bones, and it sang to him to use it. To call it up and do something with it.

  Power hates to be ignored.

  And by the time Heath was ready to leave this place, he knew he would touch that power more than once.

  What he wasn’t sure of was whether or not he needed it to call the book.

  All normal approaches and techniques said he did. Take the power, shape it the right way, and send it out to do his bidding. The essence of most magic, whatever form or system and whatever they call those steps.

  But something in Heath was tickling at him, saying, “not this time.” Three times now he’d started to dig through his backpack for his usual tools. And three times he’d pulled his empty hand back out because nothing felt right.

  Some people wanted to make magic a science. Figure out how to make it something anyone can use by following exactly the same steps every time to get exactly the same result. But in Heath’s experience, that just wasn’t how it worked. At least, not the kind of magic he did.

  Conjure was an art form.

  And right now, the artist wanted to paint without his palette.

  Heath dropped the lid on the bedpan and stood up. He stretched his sore, tired muscles and listened to his joints popping and cracking as though the hike up here had aged him thirty years.

  But when he stood tall at last, he drew a deep breath and rushed it out like it was late for a movie.

  He dug the bookmark out of his wallet. Royal red with soft gold fringe, and a heptagram of the same gold woven into the middle of the soft fabric. No more than two inches wide and four long, it could almost look innocent. He put the black leather wallet back, but the bookmark he held up before him. It tingled in his fingers now, like it had just maybe a thousandth of an amp running through it.

  Or maybe it was excited. Maybe it knew what was going to happen.

  Heath looked at it, and in a whisper he started talking to it.

  “You and me, we both know I didn’t put you back in my wallet this morning. You can pretend all you want, but you made that happen.”

  Heath waited a moment, listening with his whole being, just in case the bookmark had something to say. But he could hear only the rain, and the wind through the trees, and the gentle roar of distant thunder.

  Well, he also heard the thump of his own heart making sure he didn’t forget how nervous he felt. As though the beads of sweat on his forehead weren’t enough reminder.

  “Fine, you keep your own counsel. I won’t take it personally. But if you have nothing to say, then I imagine you aren’t going to deny it if I say you’re nothing but a scout for the grimoire itself. Isn’t that right?”

  No response. Except maybe, just maybe, it might have felt a little warmer.

  “Fine. Leave me guessing. Make this into some kind of test. But me, I’ve been tested in this game since before I ever started playing it. And I think I know what the answer to this test is.”

  Heath drew a deep breath. His gut grew tight at the thought of what he was about to say. His knees wanted to shake, and somewhere deep down the length of his spine, he felt a strong urge to throw that bookmark into the nearest creek and run for Canada.

  But lives were at stake.

  Plus, if Heath didn’t do this, his uncle might claim the book.

  Heath was not going to let that happen.

  “All right,” he said, still in a soft whisper that he hoped didn’t carry to Colin and Nariko. And he said his next words not to the bookmark, but through it. “Black Book of Saint Cyprian, come to me. I, Heath Cyr, call you by your own bookmark, held in my hand. And I swear that if you come to me now I will claim you as my own.”

  The moment the last word was out of Heath’s mouth, two things happened at the same instant.

  The rain stopped.

  A small book soundlessly appeared on stone floor in front of him. As wide as his hand and not much longer, but at least two inches thick, the book had a cover of tanned leather on the yellow side of brown. No title or author, but in the bottom right hand corner was a capital “C” as tall as Heath’s thumb.

  But Heath didn’t need a title to know what he was looking at. He could feel its magic, like the thrum of a generator powerful enough to supply the whole Portland metro area.

  The Black Book of Saint Cyprian.

  11

  Nariko and Colin whirled the moment the book arrived, turning their backs on their guard duty. Although anyone attempting to reach them at that little stone ruin still had to contend with a long, muddy, uphill hike through a heavily soaked Forest Park.

  “What the—” started Colin.

  “How did—” started Nariko.

  “What and how don’t matter,” said Heath. Could the sun be warming the place so soon? The rain had stopped barely ten seconds past, but the rectangular room felt twice as warm to Heath as it had only a moment ago. Comfortable instead of chilly. And the sage incense smell came sharper to his nose. “What matters is it’s here.”

  Nariko shivered and wrapped her arms around herself as she looked at the book. Colin shivered too, but he settled for rubbing his arms.

  “It doesn’t look like I expected,” said Colin.

  “Me ei—” started Heath, but Nariko said, loudly, “How matters a great deal. I didn’t feel you touch the power of this place, Heath. How did you call it?”

  “I used the bookmark.”

  “No,” said Colin. “We’d have felt you cast a spell. And anytime you do something fast, you tend to do it loud, so we would have heard you too.”

  “How did you use the bookmark?” asked Nariko, tone sharp as a police interrogator.