Dead to the World

both hands, I reached up and grabbed her knife wrist, and I twisted it as hard as I could while I hit her hard with my lower body. Over she went, onto the filthy cold pavement, and I landed right on top of her, pounding her hand against the ground until she released the knife. She was sobbing, the will seeping out of her.
    “You’re a lousy lookout,” I said to Holly, keeping my voice low.
    “Sookie?” Holly’s big eyes peered out from under a knit watch cap. She’d dressed for utility tonight, but she still had on bright pink lipstick.
    “What the hell are you doing here?”
    “They told me they’d get my boy if I didn’t help them.”
    I felt sick. “How long have you been helping them? Before I came to your apartment, asking for help? How long?” I shook her as hard as I could.
    “When she came to the bar with her brother, she knew there was another witch there. And she knew it wasn’t you or Sam, after she’d talked to you. Hallow can do anything. She knows everything. Late that night, she and Mark came to my apartment. They’d been in a fight; they were all messed up, and they were mad. Mark held me down while Hallow punched me. She liked that. She saw my picture of my son; she took it and said she could curse him long distance, all the way from Shreveport—make him run out in the traffic or load his daddy’s gun. . . .” Holly was crying by now. I didn’t blame her. It made me sick to think of it, and he wasn’t even my child. “I had to say I’d help her,” Holly whimpered.
    “Are there others like you in there?”
    “Forced to do this? A few of them.”
    That made some thoughts I’d heard more understandable.
    “And Jason? He in there?” Though I’d looked at all three of the male brains in the building, I still had to ask.
    “Jason is a Wiccan? For real?” She pulled off the watch cap and ran her fingers through her hair.
    “No, no, no. Is she holding him hostage?”
    “I haven’t seen him. Why on earth would Hallow have Jason?”
    I’d been fooling myself all along. A hunter would find my brother’s remains someday: it’s always hunters, or people walking their dogs, isn’t it? I felt a falling away beneath my feet, as if the ground had literally dropped out from under me, but I called myself back to the here and now, away from emotions I couldn’t afford to feel until I was in a safer place.
    “You have to get out of here,” I said in the lowest voice I could manage. “You have to get out of this area now .”
    “She’ll get my son!”
    “I guarantee she won’t.”
    Holly seemed to read something in the dim view she had of my face. “I hope you kill them all,” she said as passionately as you can in a whisper. “The only ones worth saving are Parton and Chelsea and Jane. They got blackmailed into this just like I did. Normally, they’re just Wiccans who like to live real quiet, like me. We don’t want to do no one no harm.”
    “What do they look like?”
    “Parton’s a guy about twenty-five, brown hair, short, birthmark on his cheek. Chelsea is about seventeen, her hair’s dyed that bright red. Jane, um, well—Jane’s just an old woman, you know? White hair, pants, blouse with flowers on it. Glasses.” My grandmother would have reamed Holly for lumping all old women together, but God bless her, she wasn’t around anymore, and I didn’t have the time.
    “Why didn’t Hallow put one of her toughest people out here on guard duty?” I asked, out of sheer curiosity.
    “They got a big ritual spell thing set up for tonight. I can’t believe the stay-away spell didn’t work on you. You must be resistant.” Then Holly whispered, with a little rill of laughter in her voice, “Plus, none of ’em wanted to get cold.”
    “Go on, get out of here,” I said almost inaudibly, and helped her up. “It doesn’t matter where you parked your car, go north out of here.” In case she didn’t know which direction was north, I pointed.
    Holly took off, her Nikes making almost no sound on the cracked sidewalk. Her dull dyed black hair seemed to soak up the light from the streetlamp as she passed beneath it. The smell around the house, the smell of magic, seemed to intensify. I wondered what to do now. Somehow I had to make sure that the three local Wiccans within the dilapidated building, the ones who’d been forced to serve Hallow, wouldn’t be harmed. I couldn’t think of a way in hell to do that. Could I even save one of them?
    I had a whole