Bargain With the Gods Read online

  Magic: When Ruthless Ambition is not Enough

  H E X E

  WITCHES, WARRIORS, MAGIC & MURDER

  By Rex Baron

  V O L U M E F I V E

  BARGAIN WITH THE GODS

  Hexe (this series of books) is a work of fiction.

  While some of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are based on real people and events, everything that happens to them are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  This book Copyright © 2019 Isobella Crowley, Rex Baron

  Cover Design by Jeff Brown

  Cover copyright © ProsperityQM LLC

  ProsperityQM LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  ProsperityQM LLC

  1500 South Lamar Blvd, 1050

  Austin, TX 78704

  First US edition, 2019

  Version 1.01.01

  Hexe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2019 by Isobella Crowley, Rex Baron

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Forward

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Author Notes

  Social Links

  Dedication

  Dedicated to the Power and Magic that lies deep within each of us.

  — Rex

  BARGAIN WITH THE GODS

  HEXE VOLUME 5

  JIT Beta Readers

  Brian Roberts

  Kimberley Beaulieu

  If I missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  Sarah Kante

  Author’s Forward

  Thank you for reading HEXE.I hope that you will find it an enjoyable and exciting experience. But it is important for the reader to be aware that although there are any number of historical personages characterized throughout, the events described surrounding them and their interactions with the fictional characters are largely imagined and presented as such, strictly for the sake of storytelling.

  There is no intention on the part of the author or publisher to demean or malign the reputation or character of any historical person represented and any reference to their sexual orientation or personal actions is simply hearsay, based on information collected from outside sources.

  A great deal of research has gone into the creation of this series, and every effort has been made to ensure historical accuracy—even to the descriptions of the recipes for spell casting, which have been researched from credible, centuries-old sources and included (in part) to enhance the story’s authenticity. This being said, HEXE is not intended as a primer on witchcraft and much of what is described that deals with Wicca and Witchcraft is left for the reader to further investigate for their own enjoyment.

  It might also be noted that because much of the storyline is set before the new millennium, when the notion of political correctness was not in place culturally, some of the language and description of characters might be judged as harsh or even inappropriate by today’s standards. But in the times when the events of the story are set, this was assuredly not the case. The manners and language of the 1920s differs greatly from that of the 1930s, and certainly from the parts of the story set in the 1980s or present times. In order to give the correct “feeling” to those times, I have made a strong effort to depict situations and people as they would have been seen and described then, with all the flavour and gusto of those unique and exciting times.

  I do hope you enjoy your journey into the fascinating world of HEXE, “the chosen”, and look forward to continuing the saga until its fateful and exciting conclusion.

  So Mote It Be REX BARON

  Fountain Hills, AZ, September 2019

  Chapter One

  UCLA Campus, Los Angeles, 1983

  Elizabeth shuffled the cards in her hand and slipped one out of the middle of the stack. A card printed with a yellow triangle on its face appeared. She cupped the card in her palm and held it against her forehead, concentrating on its shape and color, forming a picture of it in her mind.

  A young woman on the other side of the soundproof glass pressed a button below the shape of a square and then another under the color green. Elizabeth shook her head and indicated that the girl continue. The next card Elizabeth drew was a red circle. Once again, she pressed the card to her forehead and concentrated. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, to let the picture she held in her mind transmit itself through the glass barrier and into the young woman's mind. The girl hesitated, her finger moving haltingly over the red button. Then, with a burst of decisiveness, it strayed to the one marked blue, followed by an incorrect button push to choose a rectangle as the projected shape. Elizabeth sighed and recorded the findings. She pressed down on the intercom and spoke to the girl in the booth.

  “That will be all for today Lisa.”

  “How'd I do?” the girl asked hopefully.

  “Only three percent... not so great,” Elizabeth answered. “But I'm tired, and I'm sure that it's my fault. I'll see you on Thursday.”

  The girl hesitated, letting her long hair fall into her face as she hung her head.

  “Come on… what is it?” Elizabeth asked. “It doesn't take a mind reader or ESP to figure out there is something wrong.”

  “Well... it's like, I don't think I'll be back next Thursday,” the girl answered sheepishly. “I have the chance to take an elective course in popular music, and well, I need the credits and the easy grade.”

  “I see,” Elizabeth answered coolly.

  Elizabeth did not protest as the girl gathered her things and left the lab with a timid little smile and an unenthusiastic “have a good weekend.” She removed her glasses from her face and dragged her fingers through her honey-colored hair. She was too tired to protest. She had not slept well in weeks. Lisa had been one of the last of the group of volunteers who had made themselves available for her research work in Extra Sensory Perception. One by one they had left the program, and now she lay awake night after night, worrying that the Board of Regents would cut funding to her department if she failed to make a good showing. When she did sleep, she was visited by feverish nightmares and the disturbing presence of something so unspeakably evil that she would awaken shivering with a sense of dread, as if she had escaped something so terrible her conscious mind dared not allow her to remember.

  She gathered up the ESP cards and placed them in a neat stack, then tested the tape recorder and heat sensors to be certain they had all been switched off. She was careful. She was a scientist. She had worked for the past ten years, since graduate school, doing research in Extra Sensory Perception and Paranormal Phenomena. Nearly six of those ten years had been spent in partnership with Docto
r Phillip Mathews, a leader in the field, until his untimely death exactly one year ago to the day. When she had first met him, he was already a man in his early fifties, but the twenty year gap in their ages had never been an issue, and, in many ways, he was far more up to date on current pop culture and modern life than she could ever hope to be.

  Elizabeth surveyed the untidy contents of the lab and realized that they had not been changed, in even the most rudimentary way, since the police had come to tell her that Phillip had been found dead in the kitchen of his apartment.

  All she could remember of that moment was that one of the policemen had been wearing a straw golfer’s hat, which he snatched from his head and worried in his fingers as he delivered the news. She had been so mesmerized by the straw hat, slowly turning in the man's clumsy fingers, that she scarcely heard the sorry news that changed everything and left her alone in her work and in her life. She remembered that, at the time, she stood still and lifeless, wearing her white lab coat, and listened to the Detective and his colleague with deafened ears. It was only hours later that she replayed the interview with the police over and over in her head.

  “Sorry to ask Professor Winslow, but when was the last time you saw Doctor Mathews alive?” Detective Gibson asked, as he pulled out a small pad and a pen, in order to take down what she said. Elizabeth was stunned and had to take a moment to collect the fragments of her shattered reality before she was able to answer.

  “Yesterday… about eleven, I think. He didn’t have any classes, so he was going to look into some corporate grants that might be available.”

  “Did he seem unwell or upset in any way… when you last saw him?” the Detective’s colleague asked in a deep resonating voice.

  “No, I don’t think so… no, in fact he was rather elated about a breakthrough in one of his tests,” Elizabeth answered. “You’re not implying that he might have killed himself… that would be out of the question.”

  “No, but it’s more about how he was found that is a little bit questionable,” Detective Gibson replied.

  Elizabeth ran her fingers nervously through her hair in an attempt to get control of her wits.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, glancing back and forth between the two men for an answer. “How did he die?”

  The Detective put down his hat and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets.

  “The fact is that he was found in his kitchen, sitting at the table. His heart had stopped suddenly, and there was an exaggerated expression on his face.”

  “What kind of expression?”

  “An expression that might indicate extreme fear,” the Detective informed her gravely. And before Elizabeth could react, he added. “What leads us to suspect this… is that on a piece of paper on the table, he had written the phrase: By the pricking of my thumbs… something wicked this way comes. Do you know what he could have meant by that? Was he a diabetic or a drug user?”

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “NO, no, he never used drugs. What he’d written was a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth… Act four, scene one… when one of the witches sees Macbeth coming and thinks of him as evil.”

  The two policemen exchanged glances of frustration. They hated it when they had to deal with the eggheads and intellectual liberals at the college, with their philosophical mumbo jumbo and obscure references such as this.

  “So, what do you think he might have meant by this?” the Detective asked with a sigh of mild annoyance.

  “You must understand that Phillip, Professor Mathews, was a scientist working in the paranormal. He had been drawn to this study because he had a special gift of his own.”

  “And just what might that be,” Detective Gibson broke in, trying to urge Elizabeth to get to the point.

  “His gift was perception… feeling things,” Elizabeth answered. “In the passage from the play, the witch says… by the pricking of my thumbs… that meant a sensation, a prickling, tingling in her thumbs that meant she had a premonition, a foreknowledge of something… something wicked.”

  “So, you’re telling me that your colleague was leaving a note saying that he had a premonition of some kind that something bad was coming… and by the look on his face, it would appear that it did. Do you know what that might be?” the Detective pressed Elizabeth for more information.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as she once again dragged her fingers through her hair. “I can’t think of what he might have meant by quoting that line. I’m sorry. I wish I could be of more help.”

  Elizabeth remembered that after the Detective had collected his straw hat and was about to leave, he turned back towards her and added.

  “Oh, Miss Winslow, I almost forgot to tell you that the note on the table was addressed to you.”

  Elizabeth returned her thoughts to the cluttered space around her and the loss of her last willing student volunteer. She had become so accustomed to Phillip’s enthusiasm and diligence that she hardly noticed the weariness of the late nights spent in the lab or the passing of the seasons and holidays spent together. He would never have found himself abandoned by the volunteers and forced to participate in the tests himself, as she had, Elizabeth’s own voice chided her. He had possessed a theatrical charm and personality that attracted the student volunteers and made the tedious and repetitive tests seem adventurous and personally challenging to them. He could make them laugh, Elizabeth remembered with a sigh, a talent that she gravely lacked. He had made her laugh too. She had not realized, until it was too late and he was already gone, that she had fallen in love with him.

  Elizabeth rubbed her eyes in the dim light and told herself that she must rest. Phillip had always stressed the folly of participating personally in the exchange of telepathic experiments. It canceled out objectivity, produced conflicting evidence and generally invalidated what little real information might actually be collected. His words ran through her consciousness as she continued to set the lab in order for the following day.

  “What does it matter?” she muttered aloud. “It's not like we're studying nuclear fission or radiation and germ warfare or something that the damn government might actually pay for. Just try getting funding from them for paranormal studies, or from the damn university for that matter.”

  She smiled to herself and reminded herself that it was the price one paid for choosing work in an unrecognized and unprofitable field. Phillip had told her that often enough.

  Suddenly, she turned her head sharply to one side and strained her eyes through the half-light to see the source of the quick movements off in a corner. Outmoded equipment and paraphernalia from unsuccessful experiments had found its way into this deep and seldom used space. Empty cages, which once held guinea pigs or mice, gaped open in the dim light, and electronic panels with gauges for eyes stared back blankly at her.

  “Lisa,” she called. “Is someone there?”

  Carefully, she stepped into the darkness of the corner, but saw nothing.

  She was overtired, Elizabeth told herself, as she locked the door to the lab and started across the quad toward the faculty parking lot that lay at the outer extremities of a core of pompously respectable buildings, designed in the style of the last century. An unsettling mixture of Gothic and Italianate architecture huddled around the square courtyard, connected by a network of dimly-lighted narrow walkways, each one seeming to lead off on some indiscernible course, disappearing behind a wall or swallowed up by a forbidding overhang of shrubbery that scented the air alluringly with night-blooming jasmine.

  A night bird called shrilly in the distance. Elizabeth drew in a sharp breath and stopped. She stood still, surveying the dark stretch of walkway ahead, listening for the sounds in the darkness. She preferred to think of them as sounds rather than the voices she knew they were, the muffled sniggering that she heard in her room at night, or the menacing whisper of her name, barely discernible above the soft petticoat rustling of unseen voices. She steadied herself with an unconvincing laugh and starte
d briskly for her car.

  “At least madness doesn't run in my family,” she said aloud, as much to reassure herself, as to warn the menacing forces around her that she was not susceptible to their pervasive powers. “Unless, of course, you count my great Aunt Lucy, the opera singer,” she reasoned. “She was a spiritualist and card carrying spook, I'm told. But then again, she was lost at sea and never really came to much.”

  Elizabeth breathed in a sigh of confidence and reassured herself that except for those few tainted drops, the family bloodline was otherwise healthy and solidly reasonable.

  Voices filtered down from the dormitories, real human voices, and she felt lonely.

  “Paranormal studies is a weird business,” she sighed, shifting her heavy briefcase filled with paperwork to the other hand. “And you, dear Elizabeth, are equated with what you do. You are a spook to nearly everyone on campus. You can hardly expect them to think otherwise and invite you to their little gatherings with mulled wine and gossip about the philandering of the best-looking proctors.”

  She spoke to herself as Doctor Mathews might have, seeing her in one of her moods that he referred to jokingly as socio-sexual frustration.

  “Surely you don't expect to meet people who are normal and amusing in this line of work,” she muttered to herself. “These kids are totally distracted by the need to plumb the depths of their own mental capacities, hoping for the discovery of untapped intellect and undiscovered superhuman powers. They read too many comic books and are socially ill at ease… misfits, like me,” Elizabeth whispered the thought aloud.

  She reached the end of the walkway that veered off at a sharp angle and led her down a steep embankment to the parking lot. She unlocked her car and got in. She checked behind the seat and locked the door. As she was about to insert the key in the ignition, something caught her eye above the dashboard. A bit of white paper had been slipped under the windshield’s wiper blade. She rolled down the window and plucked the paper from its snare with her fingertips. In the dim light, cast from the instrument panel, she opened the paper and read: