Part 9

The four of them paused before the curling, black iron gates of Hamsen’s historical district. While it had already put the witches on edge to walk through a deserted town that showed no signs of its human inhabitants, being confronted by such an overwhelming presence of wrongness made them pause.

Was this what it felt to be surrounded by forbidden magic? Ammie had never felt such a disturbance skittering down her limbs before.

She looked up at the spiraling black trellises that pointed into the sky with squat ovals. As far as creepy gates went, Hamsen’s was mostly harmless. 

It looked more like a child’s toy model for a scary house than one that actually inspired fear. 

Beyond the gate, though, Ammie could see the city hall building standing taller than any of the much smaller bungalows around it. 

It’s right there, Ammie willed her legs to move. The mayor’s home and office. Their best bet to find the source of the mysterious troubles plaguing Hamsen. 

Not mysterious--Ammie reminded herself. A face-stealer named Lommeil. That was who they were dealing with now.

How a human had grabbed such despicable power for himself and had flown under the witches’ radar was the true mystery to Ammie. 

The only way he could have attained such power was by selling his soul to a demon. But demons didn’t add unnecessary souls to their employ unless the soul could give them something they wanted. 

What could Lommeil have done for the demon that it would grant it its power in return? 

Ammie shook the questions from her mind. Answers could come later. She breathed deep. 

Worry later.

Ammie felt her ears twitch as a swirling gust of wrongness passed through the gate. Her friends flinched as well, ears closing briefly to ward off the powerful aura from entering their bodies.

“Well,” Five slammed his case onto the ground. With three quick snaps, the instrument within the bulky thing was revealed. 

He pulled out an orange harp with thicker, metallic strings. Instead of smooth edges, the instrument looked like a gaping mouth filled with threatening points. “Shall we?”

Holding the harp under an arm, Five took the lead. Ammie glanced at her friends before following behind him, digging out her own combat weapon: a degraded wand made out of white birch. 

Beyond the gate, Ammie’s cat vision swirled with disgust and her tail lashed behind her unhappily. Normally, the witches of La Ville had learned enough control over their baser feline instincts to blend in with humans wherever they went. Tonight, though, Ammie let all of that go. 

She wouldn’t be dampening her elite animal intuition tonight, even for something as little as keeping her tail still.

The four walked toward the hall in a formation more akin to a combat team: Five in front, Ammie and Lis sidestepping behind him with Juliette walking backwards at the rear. 

The four witches made their way slowly to the oppressive building. Intense, yellow light filtered through the old glass, casting the tall building into overlapping layers of shadows. 

The tiny bungalows around the building stayed dark and still. Ammie perused the bright signs--a cafe, a sorbet shop, an antique den. 

Perhaps they were just closed for the night. Perhaps the shopkeepers had even closed up earlier than usual. Sometimes, when humans got scared of the unknown, they instilled a curfew for a couple of weeks, hoping whatever it was would blow over and leave by then. That would explain the deserted feeling on the tourists’ street.

It doesn’t mean something bad happened here, Ammie tried to tell herself, heart thundering in her ears.

Gripping the side of her bag where her stones were easily within reach, the group stopped at the door to the mayor’s home. 

“I’ll go,” Juliette glided from the back, holding her purple-jeweled spear once more. 

Ammie nodded, and her friend strode calmly to the front door. After knocking twice against the heavy wood, she edged the door open and paused. 

Looking back once, Juliette slipped into the opening, leaving only a cracked open door behind her. The vibrant yellow light haloed to the ground, and Ammie walked forward to stand by Five. 

His face was calm, and Ammie was reminded that unlike her, Juliette, and Lis, Five had had combat training. In fact, he’d been going on missions with her brother ever since he was thirteen years old. 

Five had six years of experience in facing danger. And Ammie had none.

Throat clogged tightly with something she refused to name, Ammie willed herself to take in this fully-fledged man. 

He had come with them. He had stumbled out of his house in the middle of the night for a mission that could get him punished by the village elders. If that happened, the town would have an even worse view of him--even if Ammie herself didn’t get anything more than a sympathy scolding. 

Five cares about Tristian, Ammie thought. She’d known. Of course, she’d known. But to have this realization now…

“Thank you for coming with us,” Ammie said quietly, tugging at his sweatshirt sleeve. “And about what I said before--”

“Don’t,” Five’s gaze didn’t waver on the cracked open door. “I don’t want to hear an apology. You were right. I let him go alone.”

“But he didn’t tell you!” Ammie protested, surprising herself. Where was her determination to make him suffer for his part in all of this? Why was her resolve crumbling after such a small amount of time spent with him?

“That’s just it, Ammie,” Five said succinctly. “He didn’t tell me.”

His ears remained steady and alert, but Ammie could tell by the small twitching of the tip of his white tail that he, too, was having trouble controlling his baser instincts tonight. 

An abrupt sound stalled whatever Ammie’s response was going to be--she surely didn’t know--and Juliette flung open the door, throwing the heavy thing behind her as if it was just a flimsy screen door.

“Go,” Juliette’s face was bleak, her rich skin nearly leeched of color. “Go, go, go.”

“What is it?” Lis flounced up to the frazzled witch, but Juliette just shoved her back. Away from the building.

“We have to get out of here,” Juliette met Ammie’s eyes. Ammie flinched at the bleak fear in their purple depths. “Now.”

Before Ammie could protest or try to calm her friend, the door rattled. 

Everyone’s eyes fell upon its shaking. It rattled in place like multiple people were shoving at the middle of it. 

What’s there? Ammie wanted to ask. What’s there that wouldn’t use the handle? 

Crack.

Ammie’s eyes widened as she detected a dent in the lower base of the door. It flowered open in tiny splinters, leaving only a tiny hole behind. 

“They’ll be out soon!” Juliette yelled. “We must go, now!”

“What are they?” Lis yelled back. She took the trembling witch by the shoulders and shook her gently. “What are they?”

Juliette sucked in a breath. Her head shook back and forth, as if even she couldn’t believe what she’d seen. “Faceless.”

“Faceless?” Ammie repeated, dread pooling within her, mind whirling back to the two faceless corpses on the mountain. “People are splitting through the door right now?”

Juliette’s eyes twinkled with frustrated tears. She shook her head violently, pushing away from the smaller girl clutching her arms. “They aren’t people anymore. Whatever took their faces--they aren’t human.”

Ammie’s heart thundered in time with her heaving breaths. Her mind was spinning in circles that didn’t connect. “Wait. The things wearing the humans’ faces aren’t human, or the faceless beings that we saw on the road don’t act like humans anymore?”

Juliette threw her hands up as another crack shoved a second hole into the shuddering door. “They’re faceless, and they’re acting like zombies! That’s all I know.”

“Okay,” Ammie let her breath fog out before her. “Okay.”

“Get ready,” Five moved his wicked orange harp to a playing position settled against his side, fingers ready at the metallic strings. “We move now, or we get attacked by the first wave high on adrenaline from breaking through a door.”

No. No. No. This wasn’t happening. “How could this have happened? How could we not know this was happening?”

Lis shook her head slowly, but Five answered sharply, “You need to focus, Ammie. What matters now is getting out of here. The rest can wait until we get back home.”

Lis closed her eyes and began chanting rapidly, two knuckles braced on her lips in a strange prayer. Her other hand was held out to her side, open.

As she chanted, a black object slowly began to form. Inky black and vapid purple, the shaft of the scythe roiled with fear and disgust. As the blade materialized in Lis’s hand, Ammie realized it wasn’t just a simple triangular blade coming out, but three. Like three points of a star smushed into the scythe’s rod so that the points stuck out at uneven angles.

Juliette had chanted soundlessly, holding her spear to the sky once more. Eyes lit with the moon’s white glow, she calmly put her beloved treasure over her knee and split it as if it was made of balsa wood and not reinforced bamboo. 

Quickly, as if put on fast-mode, the moon’s rays flew down to Juliette and enveloped her broken staff. In the blinding whiteness, Ammie couldn’t see the change, but as the light receded, two half-moon sickles shaped like paint scrapers materialized. 

The purple crystal had somehow been shattered, and the moon’s rays had blended it into the two halves, which now lit up in both the incandescence of the moon and glittering purple dust. 

The door crashed outward, and people whose faces had been ripped, slashed, swirled away like cake batter came crashing out. Their fingers were now tipped black into poisonous-looking talons. 

Five didn’t hesitate. He strummed one of the strings, and a fiery orange blast captured the new wave pouring forth onto the deserted street. 

“Move!” He shouted, turning with the heavy object and running back toward the gate. 

Ammie moved slowly after her friends, her eyes peeled on the humans. Their faces weren’t actually gone, not the like ones on the road. The layers, the strange bulges…it really reminded Ammie of swirled cake batter. 

Something had definitely turned these people inhuman, something that had rearranged their faces like putty. 

Ammie’s eyes widened as she watched the first wave of faceless start forward, their flesh burning from Five’s fire. They moved slowly, skin dripping off of them in molten patches, showing Ammie bones that had been overtaken by whatever black substance had hardened their fingers.

Oh, Moon Goddess. Ammie covered her nose, eyes burning from the oppressive smell of melting flesh. She felt as if her own eyes were burning, melting, falling into the stench. 

“Ammie!” Five called from behind her. “There’s more of them! Move your a*s!”

Whirling, Ammie watched streams of the faceless erupt from the dark storefronts. A faceless smashed into the sorbet sign, toppling it to the ground in a clattering crash.

Moon Goddess, save them. 

Ammie ran to her friends. Juliette’s eyes had gone back to their purple, and though her movements were sluggish while traversing the ground, as soon as a faceless came near, she sucked in a breath and whirled her half-moon blades in deadly accurate arcs.

Five sent blast after blast to slow the monsters, but Ammie now knew that fire wouldn’t stop them. The blasts changed, however, from the one that rained a cloud of fire over a large area to pinpointed shots of pure flame to a scattering of shots in a wide arc to a vining, snaking fire path that shot from the ground. 

Ammie had never seen Five fight before. She didn’t even know that his magic, pulled from music, could be so deadly. 

Each clang of the strings brought a different note that cocooned into the next one in a maddening crescendo that raised the hair on Ammie’s arms. If this was Five playing a harp, what on earth did his guitar-playing sound like? 

Ammie dashed next to Lis, who slashed her scythe around in diagonal cutting motions. Starting from the top left, she ended a slice at the bottom right. Then she switched it from the top right to the bottom left. 

Her cheeks scrunched in concentration, and Ammie could see sweat plastering the girl’s dull blonde hair against her forehead, curling with the dampness.

Ammie grabbed a handful of stones from her bag’s compartment, not caring to look at which ones she drew.

Imbuing the different energies into her rickety wand, Ammie held the gnarled thing out and waited.

The clash against the faceless was slowing them from leaving. When there were only a few to deal with, her friends had performed excellently. They hadn’t hesitated to bring the creatures down, no matter that they had once been human.

While Five’s experience and strength made Ammie and her friends’ basic witch training seem ridiculously futile, even he struggled to handle more of the faceless as they gathered in larger groups. 

Ammie watched their mouthless silence with revulsion. The clattering of their hardened black claws chittered like an army of insects, sending shivers down Ammie’s arms. 

When one reached Lis who was busy piercing through two faceless stuck on her scythe’s jagged points, Ammie flung her wand out in a cutting arc.

A wave of air coalesced into an invisible blade that cut through the faceless about to jump onto the girl’s back. The blast split the creature in two, sending gore to the ground in a gross splurge.

Ammie jingled the stones in her hand. There must be more blue stones in the batch than other colors. Luck of the draw.

Air, huh?

Ammie smirked, settling into a low stance. 

Air is fine.

Whenever a new creature rounded on one of her friends, Ammie sent a cutting blade of air spiraling over to it. First, she cut the legs out from under them. Then she sent a vertical slash to split the creature down the middle.

What if they could be returned back to being human? An annoying voice spoke in her mind. 

Ammie shoved it away. Even if there was a possibility that magic could restore these people--after looking at their blackened insides and mouthless, eyeless, and noseless faces, the magic required for such a feat wasn’t something Ammie or anyone she knew was capable of performing. 

Just keep slashing them away, Ammie took control of her mind. Her energy refocused. 

Sure, she didn’t have any combat magic, but with the use of her protection stones, she could use what looked like combat magic to take care of everyone. 

Protection.

Lis twirled the scythe over her head, looking back at Ammie. “Can I use that?”

Ammie nodded. “It’s all yours, Lis. You said protection was the strongest, right? Does that make your creation stronger?”

Flipping over a faceless and landing behind it, Lis smiled brilliantly. “Sure does.”

Her green eyes glowed, the bright green ring around her pupils shining once more. The scythe transformed, mixing the black and purple with a steady green. The blade was edged in it, cutting upward in a swirled green pattern on the three blades.

“Take mine, too!” Juliette called, and Lis gathered a bright pink from the witch with the moon blades. 

Now her scythe was made up of the fears and disgust that had initially overtaken the situation, but no longer was it dominated by the negative emotions. Instead, Ammie’s protection and Juliette’s love cycled through the blades, which made them stronger and sharper. 

“Time to move,” Five turned to the rest of them. His breathing was controlled, but his blank mask was tight.

Ammie flinched back at his magic-tinted eyes. Fire. There was icy blue fire roiling in those beauties. 

“Carve a path,” he ordered to Lis, who nodded and got to work on the path before them. Ammie kept an eye on the girl, ready to send a protective blast her way at any moment, when Five continued, “I’m going to try something.”

“What?” Ammie asked over the faceless’ chittering fingers. 

“Just hold on,” he said, and he strummed a melody so at odds with the fiery crescendo before that the once-human faceless even seemed to take a pause. 

A lilting melody, a haunting tune, a stinging sadness.

Ammie’s eyes filled with tears that soon streamed down her face. 

She’d never heard this song from him before, either, but she knew who it was about. 

Tristian.

Power blasted off of him in calming orange flames, reaching high into the sky, pulling his long hair above his head like a blaring tornado lay at his feet.

“Get back,” Juliette grabbed Ammie, pulling her after Lis. “He’ll follow when he’s done.”

“But,” Ammie’s stone-filled hand reached after him uselessly. The faceless were still stunned, but she needed to get her act together.

But, was it really okay to leave him alone like this?

“What if he does something dumb?” The tears were back, and Ammie dug her heels into the ground.

Juliette sighed, and Ammie realized just how exhausted the girl was. To use arcane magic not once but twice in one night…Juliette had pushed herself too far. 

The bags beneath the girl’s eyes and the constrained way she held her face showed that Juliette didn’t have much left in her before she would pass out again.

“He’s not going to sacrifice himself,” the witch sighed.

Ammie swallowed over her dry throat, sending prickly needles all throughout her body. “How do you know?”

“Because,” Juliette looked back at the blazing man. “Because he won’t leave you, Ammie. He’s not going to up and disappear, especially after Tristian did just that.”

Ammie stopped struggling against Juliette. Her eyes stopped seeing the faceless or the darkened city around them. 

Juliette edged in carefully. “You see now, don’t you, sweetie? You know that Tristian can’t possibly still be alive and hurt. Not in this place.”

Ammie shook her head, but her intelligent friend wasn’t done. With clear but sparkling eyes, Juliette finished. “We don’t know what these creatures will do once they get their hands on us. Turn us into them, rip us to shreds, I’m not sure. And we still don’t know the motivations of the mastermind--of Lommeil--for why he’s doing all of this to begin with. But, you have to see it now, right?”

Juliette’s voice was never so meek, so…hesitant. She always faced the information head-on, blunt but kind, intelligent and clear. 

Ammie didn’t want to hear it.

She felt her mouth twist up in her effort to not start yelling all at once. Juliette’s face trembled slightly, but then the moment was over.

She pulled Ammie to the gate where Lis now waited, just as the haunting melody came to an end and a concussive force, screaming notes that didn’t belong next to one another, roared into the sky.

Ammie turned back in time to see Five’s harp splinter into a thousand fiery pieces. The blast shot outward from his body, not hitting him, but piercing every faceless within reach.

At least fifty, no sixty, maybe eighty faceless flew back at the force of the piercing.

Once the immediate area had been vacated, the faceless didn’t just get up and amble back toward the man breathing heavily at the center of it all. 

No.

The fiery shards remained embedded within the blackened, faceless bodies, holding them in place with whatever object they’d been pinned down on. 

The faceless were immobilized.

The girls watched in awe as Five meandered back to them, his face gaunt and eyes bleak.

Ammie met him, trying to support his taller frame with hers. 

Her ear on his chest, she could feel her own heartbeat thundering in time with his--wild and tired.

“I don’t know how long that will hold them,” he said wearily.

“Got it,” Lis held out her scythe and splintered it with magic into four pairs of flats, almost like shoe inserts. “These will get us home fast.”

The tired witches fitted the flat things to the bottoms of their feet. Once Ammie had helped Five with his, they shot forward as if propelled by a jet engine.

“Whoa!” Five nearly toppled, but Ammie and Juliette skimmed toward him at the same time, each grabbing a side to steady him. 

Their eyes met briefly, but no words were exchanged when Five said, “Thanks.”

Juliette’s brow wrinkled slightly at Ammie’s willful expression, then said, “Of course, Quincey.”

She skimmed off to keep up with Lis who had already flown far, far ahead, and Ammie was left alone with Five at the rear.

“We need to talk later,” she said, head wedged into his side.

Five’s clumsy skimming grew steadier the longer they flew down the flat terrain. He would have issues going up the mountain, though, Ammie knew.

“Yeah,” he said, wrapping his own arm around her. “After we tell the elders and get everyone ready for battle, calling in the nearby clans, even. After all that…yeah, we do.”