“I’ve heard they are quite odd birds, the clan familiars,” Silvus said. “They don’t dwell in our world as much as a normal familiar. They don’t get close to anyone in particular.”
“Is this the familiar of Clan Walvis?” Jie asked. “It does sound like tiny whalesong.”
“Aw,” I said. (I didn’t even know whales could sing.) “Are you a whale? A tiny whale spirit?”
“I found something,” Rayner said, standing back and driving the shovel into the ground. “It’s…a woman.”
“Shit,” Thom said. “Shit.”
“We’re too late…” Silvus lowered his head.
Rayner knelt and started scooping dirt with his hands. “She looks quite young,” he said. “She doesn’t look like you at all either…”
I dared to come close and a total shock went through me. “It’s—it’s Councilwoman Garcia! She came from the council to check on the Order. I think she was trying to help us.”
“Well, that tells the whole story, doesn’t it,” Rayner said. “She must have meddled a little too much.”
“This is terrible,” Silvus said. “Does that mean someone from the Order was here?”
They all looked around and down. “Footprints,” Rayner said, indicating some small impressions in the dirt. “Well, we know someone buried her.”
“Where is my mother?” I asked. “Spirit…do you know? You took us this far.”
I saw the light dance out of the corner of my eye, at the door to one of the houses, and suddenly candles blazed to life in the windows.
I ran toward the light. For a second I forgot all about the danger I might face. I wanted to see what was in the house, and follow the light. The path to the house was well kept, unlike the rest of the village, so even in the shadows I could find my way.
“Alissa!” The vampires were right behind me.
I opened the door and stood in the middle of a cozy little house, every bit of it welcoming and almost familiar to me—battered furniture, chipped tea mugs and blue china, striped wool blankets, dusty books, crystals, and along the walls, little paintings and whales and carvings made from their bones.
I had another prickle of memory, thinking I had seen things like this before, in a cozy house just like this, and I recognized it as a house from Dutch immigrant witches who came to New York just like the normal humans.
However, many of the books looked like they had been torn from shelves and everything looked like it had been moved. Then I almost slipped on a puddle of vomit on the floor. I didn’t expect to see that. I stumbled back against the wall. Rayner was there to catch my arm.
He glanced around. “Your people have been here,” he said. “I have not seen anything like this since we were first together.”
“Somebody’s been snooping around looking for something,” Thom said.
“Is the vomit from Councilwoman Garcia?” Silvus asked.
“People always vomit from purification spells,” I gasped. “We shouldn’t be here… My mother isn’t here. Something bad happened.”
Suddenly something shot past Jie, who was standing in the doorway, nearly grazing his head before it punched into the wall and shattered a picture frame.
“Get down!” Rayner shoved me as Thom and Jie dove. Silvus chanted a spell and the door shut behind us.
“That won’t stop me…” A man materialized into the room in robes of the Order. Father Bogdan. I had only met him just a few times. He came to see Father Joshua and speak to him privately. He might attend services, but then he would leave again. He was a reformer, who helped spread the word of the Order to troubled wizards. That was all I knew about him.
He pointed a gun right at Silvus’ head. “No one move,” he said. “If my finger twitches, you’ll have a bullet in your head—and if it doesn’t kill you, it will take your magic.”
Rayner let him speak but then he didn’t hesitate another second before he reached out, grabbed Father Bogdan’s leg, and yanked his feet out from under him. Father Bogdan clearly didn’t expect Rayner to have such a strong arm, or to make a move. He was pulled to the ground and all four of them set upon him.
“Repel” Father Bogdan grunted, waving his hand, and just as quickly, he pushed the vampires back and bought himself some time. Thom had his hand on the gun, trying to wrestle it out of his hand.
“I ain’t got magic anyway,” Thom said.
Father Bogdan pulled the trigger. Thom jerked away just in time.
“You are magic,” Father Bogdan said. “And you clearly know it. If I purify you, you will become a normal human again. I can offer you this blessing.”
“Huhn,” Jie snorted. “And then what?”
“Well…you age rapidly,” Father Bogdan said, in a soft but malicious tone. “And if you’re lucky, you go to meet your gods.”
“How many of those bullets do you got?” Thom said.
“I don’t really need the bullets,” Father Bogdan said. “If I can put a hand on you, child, that is enough.” He reached for Thom’s head. “I bind you to my touch, I bind you to my grip. I shall bring you the light of Etherium.”
Thom tried to twist his head away but now Father Bogdan seemed to be bound to him.
Jie ran to intercept and Father Bogdan shot him with his wand.
Silvus stepped up, flourishing his own wand. “I release Thom from this binding!”
“I bind Thom to me—O Gods, I implore you, let my righteousness prevail over this Sinistral servant, for he is nothing but a hand of evil, and I will purge the evil from this boy.”
“Not a boy,” Thom grumbled. He had stopped fighting because his head was stuck to Father Bogdan and it seemed like moving caused him some pain.
“You shall be a boy again,” Father Bogdan said. “Come unto me, and feel no more pain of this curse. Surrender to your mortal life, Thom, and you shall no longer crave the flesh nor feel the shadow of loneliness, but will walk with the gods.”
“But craving the flesh is my favorite thing,” Thom said, and yet, his words started trailing off as he looked at Father Bogdan, who seemed to have some bewitching power. Thom’s usual devil-may-care charm melted away as his face grew as expressionless as the people of my village who were too scared to have a personality.
“No—no!” I cried, horrified at the thought of Thom, who was as wicked as he was sweet, and as caring as he was dangerous, turning into one of those defiant young men who were purified by Father Joshua and lost their spark entirely.
“I release Thom—Thom, my dear friend—from this binding!” Silvus said, more forcefully.
Rayner and Jie immediately lunged toward Father Bogdan to wrestle him physically as Silvus fought to break the binding.
What could I do? Just sit here uselessly? Was this all I was ever meant for, to sit around helplessly, to watch my family die or be harmed while I cowered or ran away?
If I only had my wand…
Maybe a wand would give me enough power to help…
“Help me,” I whispered. “Help me, spirit, whatever you are…”
Father Bogdan threw Jie into the window. Glass shattered and wood splintered. But he also was forced to release Thom. The fight shifted toward the broken window as Jie didn’t pop back up right away and Thom still looked dazed. Rayner went to help Jie and Silvus was barely holding Father Bogdan off.
I wasn’t doing anything here, that was certain, so I turned instead to the narrow stairs at the back of the cottage. I quickly crawled up them and found an attic room with all the things my mother must not use on a daily basis. I saw trunks and shelves with dirty old clutter. A few dresses hung to dry on a line. Nothing looked that useful. It could have been our attic back home.
“Please…help!” I begged aloud, hearing shouts and crashes continuing downstairs. “I don’t want to be useless anymore. Aren’t I a witch!?”
After a painfully long moment, something appeared—but not just a light. A form appeared. It looked like a boy wearing a knee-length dark coat and britches l
ike someone from the 1700s, wild silver-gray hair falling in his face. He looked almost human, but not quite, like something was off. A boy of fourteen or fifteen—at least on the surface. His skin was as grayish as his hair, and his eyes were pure black and looked ancient. His presence was so strange but in the midst of a fight I could only accept it as normal. He heard the crashes too, and looked troubled.
“Wh…,” he said.
“What?” I said, trying not to sound completely frantic. I didn’t have time for this.
“The whale bones…,” he said. He seemed to struggle with speaking as if he wasn’t used to doing it. Or maybe he didn’t know much English. “…are spells.” He gestured to the walls and then pointed at me. “Use them. Use them…strongly. Like a tidal wave.” He gestured outward, his sleeves flapping around him.
“How?”
“You know how,” he said.
“Okay. Thanks.” That didn’t seem like much help to me, but I didn’t have time to ask any more questions. I ran downstairs to find Father Bogdan very close to the stairs, facing the window, but now he turned toward me. He looked at me and lunged.
It seemed like, in the moments I was gone, his focus had changed. He thought he would attack the vampires. They were proving a good match for him. Now he just wanted me. Father Joshua was really hunting for me, not my men.
“He’ll kill your sisters, Alissa,” Father Bogdan said. “Come with me. You won’t get them back unless you come with me. You can be with them. Take care of them. At least you’ll know they are safe.”
“He won’t kill them,” I said.
“He’ll kill Joan,” he said. “He’ll kill the baby. She won’t even know. She’s too young to fear. I’m afraid he will be forced to do it, child. For the good of all of our people. If you don’t come home, all of us will die when the end of the world comes.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “A total lie.”
“You still believe it, deep down,” he said, with a slow smile. “I know you understand that Father Joshua’s teachings were true. You see this world, now that you’re out in it, how fragile and dark it is, how wicked the mundanes are. They know nothing of nature. They clog their world with poison. They have replaced faith with fluff.”
“That’s how you see it,” I said, but I had seen that the mundane girls were free. They weren’t perfect, but they were free to go out in the world and laugh and express themselves, and even though Dee was struggling to provide for her little girl and having problems with men, and Rosie had left her religious family to be a vampire’s thrall, they had a thousand choices that I never had, and they were comfortable with themselves in a way that I was never permitted.
The world was a lot more complicated than I thought.
But my sisters…
I just had to act. I had to trust Rayner and the guys would stick to their promise and we would save them, that this was a hollow threat. I pulled one of the scrimshaw off the wall. I hadn’t really looked at the artwork on them before, but what seemed like a village seashore scene from a distance actually had tiny details of a man drowning in the ocean while a group of women watched.
I pushed my arms out like the boy and said, “Drown! Drown! You must drown!” I poured all my fear into the spell instead.
Water started bubbling out of Father Bogdan’s nose and mouth. I could smell the brine. He reeled away from me and stumbled. He tried to speak, choking on the water.
I cast the spell that killed him.
I should have been horrified at myself. Was it right for me to kill a man and watch? Why did I need to watch? Some part of me relished it. Some part of me wanted to see that his life was snuffed out by my will and the spells in my mother’s house.
He stopped twitching and water spilled out of his bloated face. Rayner met my eyes. It was the first time he looked at me, not as his thrall, his pet, his wife, the thing he had to protect—but as his match.
A tiny smile flitted across his face and then it all rushed out of me and I fell toward the nearest chair, shaking all over, but Thom caught me instead and spun me around. “That was something!” he said. “You saved our asses.”
“I’m sure you’re being modest.”
Silvus took my hand. “You did everything you needed to do.”
“Definitely one of us,” Jie said.
They were surrounding me with an intense pride in me, like there was nothing I could have done to please them more.
“And she’s all mine tonight,” Thom said. Now he looked into my eyes. His gaze made me tremble, and so did the hand that held me steady at my waist. The memory of Thom and Bertie crossed my mind, sharp as a knife.
“Tomorrow night,” Silvus said. “I am not sure this is a night for sleeping. I still have a lot of questions. It would appear your mother was here this very day, and we haven’t found her yet.”
“Let’s go find your mother, Tulip,” Rayner said.
Chapter Thirteen
Alissa
“So that will o’ the wisp told you to do it?” Thom shook his head as he helped me up the rocks. There was no path out here, but the forest was very rocky as it climbed up a mountain slope, with huge slabs of stone rising around us up to ten feet tall.
“That’s right. But he took the form of a person.”
“Man, the magic world will never make much sense to me.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense to you,” Silvus said acerbically. “The magical world has always had its own laws. We’ve studied them so we know what they mean. I believe it’s just as I said. The boy is a clan familiar. How fascinating! Most of them have died out. I’m sure Alissa’s mother can tell us more about him.” He took my hand and held out his wand. “She came through here. But she’s done a superb job of covering her tracks. It’s only when I touch Alissa that I can sense it at all.”
“So there really is a blood tie between us…”
“That’s right.”
I felt bruised up from climbing over rocks in the dark, but I hardly felt the pain. I was starting to get excited about meeting my real mother, wondering what she would look like and if we’d feel the connection of family right away. How much did blood matter? I knew that I never doubted the parents who raised me.
We reached the dark mouth of a cave, wide enough for us all to walk inside, and around five feet tall. The smell of moist rocks and the slick sheen of the rocks that made up the cave floor were not a place I wanted to go, but Silvus said, “There’s her hiding place. Witches love a cave. I’m sure it’s larger inside. They would have placed the village near a cave where they could hide if needed.”
“I think I should take Lisbeth and go alone,” Rayner said. Sometimes he still slipped back to my old name. “This woman clearly has a tie to our home. I don’t want to frighten her with the whole lot of you.” He took my hand. “I’m with you.”
“I know.” I trusted him. But it was still a terrifying hole in the ground. The rocks jabbed my feet and knees. I couldn’t see at all. Rayner kept a hand around my waist but soon it was clear that he couldn’t see either. His night vision still required some light.
The world was his hand, his breath, and the damp darkness that swallowed us. I heard water trickling somewhere.
“Was Silvus completely certain about this?”
“He doesn’t steer me wrong,” Rayner said, surprisingly confident despite his nerves. “I have to trust so many things to Silvus.”
A blue light streaked through the cave, briefly illuminating formations and the shape of a person. The light hit Rayner in the shoulder.
“We come in peace!” he said through a hiss of pain. “I brought your daughter!”
I heard the woman’s faint breathing. “My daughter…”
“Yes,” I said. “Are you Eileen?”
She let out a breath and I heard something clatter to the ground. “I don’t have a light,” she said.
“You can’t make one with magic?” Rayner asked. “You’ll see—we are who we claim to be. The
priest of the Order is dead.”
“He did something to me,” she said. “He shot me and I feel…strange. I can’t use magic. I just had that one attack spell on me.”
“He purified you,” I said. “Oh…no. If you’re a Sinistral witch, he might have messed up your magic for good.”
“I was afraid of that,” she said.
“I’m going to help her,” Rayner said, his fingers drawing away from mine. I heard him moving toward her voice. He was faster than me, even when he couldn’t see. “Silvus can heal you, a little bit.”
“So you killed him?” she said.
“Yes. Your daughter killed him.”
“Good,” she said. “Very good.” They moved close to me and an unfamiliar hand now clasped mine. “Lisbeth…!”
“You know me as Lisbeth too?”
Now her arms went around me and held me tight. “All that you must have gone through after they took you from me…I am so sorry for all of that. But I’m glad you found your clan, in the end.”
When we made our way back out, I was able to hear the whole story, and see the face of the woman who gave birth to me. Her voice, weakened by the effects of the purification spell, led me to expect a frail old woman. I was definitely shocked to see a beautiful red-haired woman who resembled me strongly. She hardly looked older than forty. She was bleeding, though, and her clothes were bedraggled and homespun, dirtied from making her way through the dark woods to escape.
“We look so alike!” she said. “I often imagined you growing up. I begged for dreams of you like the dreams I had when I was pregnant. That was why I named you Lisbeth. I saw another life, and in that life I was your mother in Amsterdam.”
“You’re Lisbeth’s mother?” Rayner said. “This has never happened before.”
“The circle is closing,” Silvus said. “This is Lisbeth’s final life. Her mother’s spirit has returned to her to see her one more time.”
“But then…you were a week old and they took you from me. They threatened my life and I’ve been hiding ever since. Well, like most witches, I don’t mind being alone minding my own business. I had my familiar, and when you were born, Waldemar appeared. Has he appeared to you?”
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