Beguiled

by Darynda Jones

  “Deph!” Annette ran up and clutched onto my arm. “Oh my God, I was worried you wouldn’t show.”

  I heard voices coming from the dining room, and the edges of my vision blurred. “Annette, please tell me this isn’t really happening.”

  “It’s totally happening. Snap out of it. You have to do magic, and you’ll need your wits about you.” She dragged me closer to the sounds but stopped and gave me a once-over. “What are you wearing? You’re supposed to be dressed like a medium.”

  “I am a medium. I just like loose-fitting clothes better.”

  “Here.” She ran to a closet and brought out a dressing gown of old. Like really old. A burgundy velvet thing that hung like curtains to the floor. She wrestled it over to me as Gigi came out.

  She’d clearly spiffed up for the event. Her black hair fairly glistened, and she wore a long dark dress that made her look part 1920s flapper and part awards-show thespian.

  “Gigi! Oh, thank the Goddess. You can do this, right? You used to do séances?”

  “I did. For fun with friends.”

  “Then you know what to do and… Oh my God, did you actually wear this?” I asked, holding up the thick dressing gown.

  Annette shoved the thing over my shoulders as Roane and Gigi looked on.

  Gigi stared in horror. “I have never seen that before. Are those my curtains?”

  “I found it at the Salvation Army. I think it belonged to a sultan.”

  I shrugged out of it and turned to her. “I am not wearing that ridiculous thing.”

  “Fine. At least wear the headdress.” She held up a hot-pink terrycloth headwrap. The same hot-pink terrycloth headwrap that I used to put up my hair after a shower.

  “Gigi, you have to save me.”

  “It wasn’t real,” she said. “I’m not a seer. I could just find lost things. Like you. So, you know, do that.”

  Serinda peeked around the corner. The gang was all here.

  Humiliation surged inside me. “Did you guys actually buy tickets?”

  “Hell yes, we did,” Serinda said. “Now get in here. We demand to be entertained.”

  I rolled my eyes and let Annette literally push me into the dining room. Eleven people sat around a table and all but two of them were from my grandmother’s coven. All but two of them bowed their heads when I entered.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” I whispered to Annette.

  “You know what they say.”

  I turned to her and asked from between clenched teeth, “No, Annette, what do they say?”

  “Fake it ’til you make it.” She patted the chair at the head of the table, her excitement infectious.

  The scent of barbeque wafted toward me, and my stomach growled. “I’m going to kill you, but the food smells divine.” They’d set up the buffet on the sidebar. The very aromatic food, so that wouldn’t be distracting at all.

  “Sarru,” Theo said when I looked at him, his face full of exhilaration. These poor people had been swindled, and they didn’t even know it. This was going to be sad.

  “Theo. Shanti.” I addressed several of the coven members and then looked at the two guests I hadn’t met yet. “And you are?”

  “Oh, no,” Annette said, shoving me into the chair. “You have to figure that out all by yourself. They paid good money for all of this.”

  Great. I looked around as Roane went to the sidebar and started making himself a plate. Annette glared at his back. The mirror in front of him proved he didn’t care. In fact, I’d say he was on the verge of laughing.

  They were all so expectant, so excited, that I caved like a spelunker. “Look, I’m not a psychic or a medium or whatever I’m supposed to be. I’ll just do what I can.”

  Gigi nodded as though that was exactly the right thing to say.

  I started with the person on my left: Shanti. I held out my hand to her.

  Shanti shook her head. “You’ve already read most of us yesterday, Sarru. Please feel free to skip us.”

  “You paid good money for this.”

  “To be in your presence. I expect nothing more.”

  I leaned closer to her. “Will you be my best friend? Mine has gone crazy.”

  “And she is also sarru,” Shanti said, squeezing her hands to her chest. “We are so honored.”

  All of the coven members bowed to her as well.

  I guess word had gotten out. Annette looked at me and shrugged in helplessness, not sure how to take their reverence either.

  “Okay, then, if the gentleman in the back would kindly take a seat.”

  Roane turned to me, his grin the stuff of fantasies, and sat at a small bistro in the corner.

  “I guess, maybe we should—”

  A female voice interrupted. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  We all turned to see a young woman standing under the archway. She wore a thick gray sweater that was two sizes too big, and patches of auburn hair hung over her face. The rest was loosely secured in a hairclip, and her eyes were red and swollen. Haggard was the first word that came to mind.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said. “I knocked and the door just opened. I’m sorry.”

  She started to rush away.

  “Wait,” I said standing.

  She turned back to us. “It’s just, I tried to get into the séance, but it filled up immediately and I… I lost my daughter yesterday.”

  The news stole my breath. I pulled out my chair and gestured for her to sit.

  “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, her voice cracking.

  I knelt in front of her. “What do you mean you lost your daughter? Is she missing?”

  She pressed her lips together as the wetness gathering between her lashes spilled over them. “I miscarried. I was five months pregnant, and I just wanted to know if she was okay.”

  Her agony pressed into my chest. I fought for air as I explained. “I am so sorry, hon, but this isn’t really what I do.” I gestured toward the room. The table. The ridiculous situation I was in.

  “Can you try? Please. Can you search?” Her chin quivered. She was barely hanging on.

  I had to at least try. I could see the departed on this plane, but to cross into the veil and look for one in the veil was another matter altogether.

  Still… I lowered my head and searched for a spell, if there was one. They rushed past me. Spell after spell until… There. Hiding in a dark corner. It sat unassuming and innocuous, like a wallflower at a Regency ball, obscured by brighter, more eager spells. The finder of lost souls. I brought it forth and drew it on the air. Light burst from the lines and sprang to life before me, leaching out and blinding me for a moment. I touched her arm and searched.

  Souls are not an age. They may take the form of the human age of their chalice, but that was a residual effect from the seer’s perspective, the human’s memories, not the soul itself. They are eternal. They are hourglasses that never run out of sand.

  “Samantha,” I said, finding her at last. She would have had red hair like her mother, only curlier. Hazel eyes like her father, only greener.

  A child of about four in the veil, she turned and waved at me, then ran off to play with a little boy named Eric. Red hair. Hazel eyes. Her little brother who was not due on Earth for another year. And then she’d have to wait ninety-seven years more for him to come play with her in the sandbox again.

  “Defiance?”

  I heard Gigi’s voice from a distance, but I needed to know. I turned to the girl’s grandfather. “You’ll keep her safe?”

  “Always,” he promised.

  “Defiance,” Roane said, and I lifted my lids.

  He knelt in front of me, his expression worried. “Where were you?”

  “I was… past the veil.” I looked at Gigi then the woman. Margie. I had a feeling her name was Margie. “I found her.”

  She clutched at her sweater, her eyes filled with hope.

  “She’s there with her grandfather and her little brother.”

  M
argie frowned and shook her head. “I don’t understand. She doesn’t…” And then my words sank in. She covered her mouth with both hands. “I’m going to have a son?”

  I felt a slow smile tug at the corners of my mouth, and her emotion wrenched a single sob from her throat. “Thank you.” She leaned over and pulled me into her arms. “Thank you so much.”

  We stood, and I only realized my cheeks were wet when cool air washed over them.

  “You said my daughter’s name. Samantha. Do you happen to know what my son’s name will be?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  She nodded. “More than anything.”

  “Eric.”

  She inhaled softly. “That was my father’s name.”

  I nodded. “He’s so happy he can watch over Samantha until you get there.”

  She gathered herself and then backed out of the room. “I’m so sorry again, but thank you, Ms. Dayne. Thank you so much.”

  I turned to the room. Each face looked at me with awe. Even Annette. Gigi and Serinda were more proud than awestruck, but I’d take it.

  “So,” I said, clapping my hands together. “We’re going to have to do this pretty quickly, because this piece of paper is burning a hole in my pocket. Literally.” After a drawn-out silence that defined awkward, I sat back down and made a suggestion. “Maybe we should hold hands?”

  They all complied. Each member took the hands of their neighbors and waited. Just like I did. I waited. For a sign. For inspiration. For the ground to open up and swallow me whole. This was going to bomb so bad. Especially because the burning in my pocket kept stealing my concentration.

  “Hold on,” I said to Shanti. Taking my hand back, I dug the receipt out of my jeans and put it on the table. It glowed. It wanted to tell me more.

  Annette’s eyes rounded to saucers, and I remembered the last time this happened, she couldn’t see the glow. But that was just a few days ago. She’d come into her powers already. Perhaps she’d just needed time to adjust. Her body needed time to adapt. Or maybe the explosion knocked something loose in her psyche. She’d only started seeing into the veil after that.

  But the glow was calling to me. Mr. Ferebee was in trouble.

  “Okay, this isn’t working. I’m sorry. Can we reschedule?”

  “Sarru,” Theo said, “you’ve already made contact with one soul. You have done exactly what a séance is designed to do.”

  “True, but I know everyone would like me to try to contact their loved ones.”

  “You do what you have to do, Sarru,” Shanti said. “Me thinks there are greater games afoot.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much,” I said as I stood and started to back out of the room. “But eat. Drink. Be merry. We will reschedule.” I looked at Annette. “I need to know where he is.”

  “Joaquin Ferebee?”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried everything. I can’t find him.”

  I could hardly blame her. I couldn’t find him either. I looked up, confronting the universe as a whole. “Look, you want me to find him so bad, you show me where he is.”

  The receipt grew brighter on the table, but that was about it.

  “Fine.” I scooped it up. “I’ll call the chief. Maybe he had some luck with the ping thing.”

  Annette hurried around to join me. “The ping thing?”

  But as I turned, the receipt got hotter. I turned back, then around again. “It is literally playing the Hot and Cold game with me.”

  “Let’s go,” Roane said, grabbing his jacket off a hook in the hall.

  “Save me some barbeque,” I said to Gigi and started out, but a second before I hurried away, I caught the gaze of one of the guests. The unguarded gaze.

  I whirled back around and locked on to her.

  She jumped, startled by my sudden attention. She was a member of the coven. I’d spoken to her the day before. Johanna, perhaps? Midthirties. Dirty blonde hair. A hard jawline that made her look more masculine than she liked. She tried to glance away, to avert her gaze.

  I. Did. Not. Let. Her.

  I continued to stare, going deeper and deeper, astonished at what she was searching for: vengeance. She was using dark magics to torture a man she had been stalking for years. A man who, from what I could tell, only wanted her to leave him alone. She was ruining his life on every level—financially, psychologically, medically—all because he’d rejected her.

  Oh, hell no.

  How I missed all this the day before was beyond me. She was good, though. With black magic. She’d come prepared tonight to continue to thwart my attempts to see beyond her shield, but my hasty exit had set her mind at ease. She’d dropped her guard. She’d practically invited me in.

  What she was doing to that man was unacceptable, and anger burst out of me in one volatile wave. The only thing standing between us was the table, so I removed it. I splintered it into a million pieces. They fanned out like the fragments of an exploding supernova, then froze in midair.

  Everyone reared back as the pieces hovered in the air around them. Not touching. Just suspended temporarily so I could confront the woman sitting across from me.

  I walked through the pieces, twirling several as I brushed past, and stood over her. She was blood born, but her mother, a dark witch kicked out of every coven she’d ever joined, was a vindictive bitch. She grew up with hatred seething in her heart. That didn’t, however, excuse her behavior.

  Easing closer, I searched harder. She was more than capable of screwing with someone’s memory, but she had nothing to do with Gigi’s death. While I could see that, she’d had nefarious plans for a couple of the coven members, including Shanti. Her jealousy of the woman bordered on psychotic.

  “What should I do with someone like you?”

  I heard Gigi behind me. “What is it, Defiance?”

  “Black magic.”

  An audible gasp echoed around me.

  “Vengeance. Resentment. Vehemence. And pretty much all seven of the deadly sins.”

  “Johanna?” Serinda said in disbelief. She had them all fooled.

  I knew once the coven found out about the black magic, she’d be cast out, but I needed to make sure things were set right for her target, a contractor named Phillip. “Do you know how quickly I can strip your mind and leave you a drooling vegetable?”

  She raised her chin, utterly remorseless when she forced out the words, “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not. But I am.” She would not stop. It was inside her. Buried deep in the marrow of her being. What did one do with someone like this indeed? If one is a charmling, she protects her sisters.

  “You’re right,” Johanna said. Though her reverence for me was real, the toxicity inside her, the seething hatred, would fester inside her soul until the end of time if left unchecked. “It’s the black magics. They changed me.”

  “No, they didn’t. They nourished the wolf you fed.” I drew a spell on the air just as she lunged at me. Roane jerked me back as it ripped her soul to shreds. Stripped her of her magics. Relieved her of any talent, blood born or otherwise, completely. It didn’t mean she couldn’t still hurt people. She would just have to do it the old-fashioned way, and that required a lot more work.

  The force of the spell knocked her breath away. She sank back into the chair, stunned.

  “Get help,” I said to her. “Then come back to see me.”

  We walked back through the table shards. I grabbed my jacket and snapped my fingers to release them. By the time I looked back, the table was reformed, sturdy as ever.

  Roane stopped, looked at the table, then grabbed his jacket and headed toward the door.

  “You coming?” I asked Annette.

  She rehinged her jaw and nodded, scooping up her jacket on the way.

  “You think I was too harsh on her?” I asked Roane as we hurried to his truck.

  “What? No. Hell no. I promise you, Serinda will be harsher. It’s just, the table thing. That was new.”


  “Right? How’d I even do that?” I looked at Annette. “I was always so bad at puzzles and then poof! It’s back together.”

  Roane opened the doors for us. “Yes. That’s what I’m most impressed with. Your puzzle prowess.”

  “You’re being sarcastic.”

  “Nooo,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat. He pulled onto the street while Annette called the chief.

  “He’s made a decision,” I said to them. “Mr. Ferebee. I just can’t figure out what that means. What kind of decision and why the universe is so against it.”

  “Not the universe,” Roane said as I gave him a general direction to drive in based on what the receipt had indicated. “You. Your magics are tied to your morals. Your sense of justice. So whatever he’s decided, it goes against what you would want for him.”

  Annette lowered her phone. “He pinged Mr. Ferebee’s phone. He’s at a park. I think I know what he decided. What he has planned.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think he’s going to kill someone.”

  Twenty

  Be the reason someone smiles today.

  Or the reason they drink.

  Whatever works.

  —Meme

  “The chief is meeting us there,” Annette said as Roane sped toward Salem Woods.

  I clutched onto my seatbelt when he took a turn particularly fast. “Why do you think he’s going to kill someone?”

  “According to the chief, he bought a gun.”

  My heart sank in my chest, finally understanding. “He’s not going to kill anyone but himself.”

  “How do you know?” Roane asked.

  “The sadness I felt in him. The frustration. It’s too much.”

  We found the dark-gray Dodge almost immediately. He’d parked near a hiking trail, facing a thickly wooded area, his silhouette placing him in the driver’s seat. When our headlights flashed across his windows, the light glinted off something metal in Mr. Ferebee’s hand. At that exact moment, the receipt burned my hand. I dropped it and jumped out of Roane’s truck before he’d come to a full stop.

  “Defiance!”

  I heard him call out to me as I ran to the truck, but I had to stop Mr. Ferebee. That was all I could think. I was about ten feet away from his door when a massive wolf jumped into my path and lunged at me, forcing me back. Even in the darkness, his fur almost shimmered as he stalked toward me, a deep growl rolling out of his chest, moonlight glinting off his bared teeth.