The Spook's Sacrifice Read Free Page A

three witch clans
who opposed us.
    'Aye, it's a dangerous place, Greece. Your mam has
much to contend with . . . There are also feral lamia
witches – the ones who scuttle about on four limbs.
    They're very common in Greece, especially in the
mountains. After this lesson's over I suggest you go up
to the library, look them up in my Bestiary, revise your
knowledge of them and enter a summary of what you
find in your notebook.'
    'You mentioned that "elementals" live with the
Ordeen as well? What kind are they?' I asked.
    'Fire elementals – something we don't have in the
County, lad. But I'll tell you what I know about them
on another day. For now we'd better continue your
study of the Old Tongue, which is much harder to
learn than Latin or Greek.'
     
    The Spook was right. The rest of the lesson was so
difficult it made my head hurt. It was very important
that I learn the Old Tongue though: it was commonly
used by the Old Gods and their disciples; also in
grimoires – books of dark magic used by
necromancers.
    I was relieved when the lesson came to a close and I
was able to go up to my master's library. I really
enjoyed my visits there. It was the Spook's pride and
joy and he'd inherited it, along with the house, from
his own master, Henry Horrocks. Some of the books
had belonged to previous spooks and went back many
generations; some had been written by John Gregory
himself. They chronicled a lifetime of knowledge
acquired practising his trade and fighting the dark.
    The Spook always worried that something might
happen to his library: when Alice was staying with us,
her job had been to make extra copies of the books,
writing them out by hand. Mr Gregory believed that
one of his main duties was to preserve that library for
future spooks, adding to the fund of knowledge
whenever possible.
    There were racks of shelves containing thousands of
books but I headed straight for the Bestiary. It was a list
of all sorts of creatures, from boggarts and daemons to
elementals and witches, along with personal accounts
and sketches where the Spook described how he'd
dealt with the dark. I flicked through the pages until I
came to 'Lamia Witches'.
    The first Lamia was a powerful enchantress of great beauty. She loved Zeus, the leader of the Old Gods, who was already married to the goddess Hera. Unwisely, Lamia then bore Zeus' children. On discovering this, in a jealous rage, Hera slew all but one of these unfortunate infants. Driven insane by grief, Lamia began to kill children wherever she found them so that streams and rivers ran red with their blood and the air trembled with the cries of distraught parents. At last the Gods punished her by shifting her shape so that her lower body was sinuous and scaled like that of a serpent.
    Thus changed, she now turned her attentions to young men. She would call to them in a forest glade, only her beautiful head and shoulders visible above the lush green grass. Once she had lured him close, she wrapped her lower body around her victim tightly, squeezing the breath from his helpless body as her mouth fastened upon his neck until the very last drop of blood was drained.
    Lamia later had a lover called Chaemog, a spiderthing that dwelt in the deepest caverns of the earth. She bore him triplets, all female, and these were the first lamia witches. On their thirteenth birthday they quarrelled with their mother and, after a terrible fight, tore off all her limbs and ripped her body into pieces. They fed every bit of her, including her heart, to a herd of wild boar.
    The book then went on to describe the different
types of lamia witch – what they looked like, how they
behaved – and, most importantly for a spook, how to
deal with them. I knew quite a lot about lamia witches
already. The Spook had lived for years with a domestic
lamia witch called Meg and had kept her feral sister,
Marcia, locked in a pit in the cellar of his Anglezarke
house. They had both returned to Greece, but during
my time at