Once Blessed, Thrice Cursed: A Sister Witches Urban Fantasy #1

by Coralie Moss

  I sucked in a breath as the ghostly imprint of my mother’s hand appeared on the door to the office. The emerald and gold ring circled her middle finger.

  “The key,” Alabastair whispered.

  “Silence.” Rémy dipped the braid into the vial again and again, moving closer to the actual door. The second image repeated the first, only this time my mother’s hand was pressed against the wall. She had twisted the ring. We couldn’t see the emerald. The third image showed a flat metal plate with a small hole at its center and no latch.

  “I assume one of you possesses a ring like that?” Rémy asked.

  “Yes.” Alderose slipped the thick gold band onto her middle finger, faced the nearest wall within the office, and held her hand in the same position. She swayed back and forth, mimicking our mother’s movements. We held our breath, hoping for something concrete to appear.

  “Keep trying,” Alabastair said. He wiggled the thumbtack holding an outdated calendar to the wall and set to work removing the few other notes curling away from the grime-streaked paint. He and Kostya lifted the desk and carried it out of the office, giving Alderose more room to move.

  She lifted her arm, hovered her hand, and whispered, “Bingo.”

  A door-sized section of the wall slid away. A narrow set of wood stairs led upward, and sconces set into the walls began to glow.

  Kostya followed Alderose. Rémy stepped forward next, then Beryl, and me. Alabastair took up the rear. Ten steps up, we came to a switchback landing. Ten more steps brought us to the second floor, and the double doors to my parents’ apartment. I pressed my hand against the wall. Cold seeped from the horsehair plaster.

  “Keep going,” said Rémy, “to the third floor.”

  The paneled walls of the final landing were stained the color of tobacco juice. Centered on the only door was the tarnished brass plate we had seen earlier. It was easily twelve inches high and six inches wide with a hole in the center.

  “The ring is the key.” Alabastair’s deep bass startled me off the step. He caught my shoulders, apologized, and added for everyone’s benefit, “Try putting the ring in the keyhole, Alderose.”

  With four bodies ahead of me, I didn’t see what happened next, only felt the collective intake of breath as the door swung open into a cavernous room and the ceiling burst into light.

  3

  No one moved.

  “What do you see?” Beryl asked the question on the tip of my tongue. Before Alderose could answer, the rest of us flowed through the doorway to see my mother’s real office for ourselves.

  “This is it,” Rémy said. “The furniture, the lights, the tables, everything.”

  Alderose gave a low whistle as she gazed upward and turned in a circle. “The ceiling in here must be eighteen, twenty feet high.”

  It looked like we had entered a couturier’s workroom. Chandeliers illuminated the four quadrants of the loft-like space. Headless dressmaker’s dummies were scattered about. Two were unclothed and four were draped in garments in varying stages of completion. If I had the ability to animate the mannequins and get them to speak, I’d start with the one in the intricate, black lace bustier.

  I took a few steps farther into the room and sniffed. Underneath the musty air were the scents of old wood, cloth, and the oil my mother used on her scissors and sewing machines. The walls were lined with shelving units packed with bolts of fabric and neatly ordered spools of thread.

  A long, low table designated the hat-making area. Narrow shelves above the table held hat forms and dummy heads. On the opposite side of the room, shoe lasts were lined up along one of the larger shelves. Underneath, hanging from hooks, were slopers, pattern pieces cut from stiff paper, which I remembered from one of my mother’s impromptu clothing-design lessons.

  I looked around again. If an outsider wanted to judge my mother by the retail space on the ground floor, they could have easily assumed she was a romance-reading dilettante who dabbled in an array of needlework techniques.

  In this space, serious design and fabrication was taking place. Which only made me miss her and everything she could have taught me—us—even more. Seeing this workroom also begged important questions. Was our mother intending to bring us into the family business? Could she have been surreptitiously imparting her methods on her daughters from the time she first opened the door to Needles and Sins? If so, how we were going to separate her keep-the-girls-busy tasks from her teach-the-girls-to-become-matchmaker tasks?

  Those questions were too much to contemplate within the isolation of my own head. Plus, the more immediate task ahead of us was to hear out Rémy Ruisseau. A quick glance showed he was as curious about the contents of the room as the rest of us. I decided a couple more minutes spent cataloguing my mother’s workroom was fine and would help keep my emotions on an even keel.

  The general layout was the same as the ground floor. The wall facing the public parking lot in back had one window and the side walls had none, as the neighboring buildings were built right up against one another. The wall fronting the street had four windows. They were large and unadorned except for more grime.

  A massive desk, set at an angle and facing into the room, anchored the front, right-hand corner. As everyone continued to migrate toward whatever caught their interest, I sniffed at the air again. Fresh petrichor filled my nostrils, followed quickly by the faintest scent of dried blood, bird shit, and—

  “I smell death,” I said under my breath. Alabastair pivoted and was beside me in a flash.

  “Where?” he asked, concern flattening his pale eyebrows. I flared my nostrils, half closed my eyes, and let my magic—my ability to connect to moments from other peoples’ pasts—guide me. Turning slowly, I stopped when I faced the rear wall. The door we’d entered through sat to the right of center. Brown-edged water stains marred the repetitive floral pattern of the Arts and Crafts wallpaper.

  “Here,” I said, moving toward the shadowy, left-hand corner. I was drawn to the wall’s sole window. I swept my gaze upward and located the source of the rain-scented air. Much of the upper pane of glass was missing. Flecks of silvery-white bird droppings streaked the lower pane. The windowsill was caked with guano, along with a few curling, pale white feathers.

  “Looks like some kind of bird has been living here,” I said. Turning on my heel, I quickly perused the other walls. They were free of splotches. I stepped closer to the back wall and noted the staining began about a third of the way up. There was a reddish cast to these stains. Flakes lifted away in spots, like the edges of dead rose petals. I all but did a face-plant against a particularly thick spot when I realized my nose was an inch away from a patch of dried blood.

  I faltered, stumbling backward onto Alabastair’s foot. “Breathe,” he said, steadying my upper arms, “and sit down. Let me help you.”

  My legs gave out. The necromancer helped me to the floor until I was lying on my side. From a distance, I could see the entire back wall if I squinted slightly. Magical threads, thin and pearlescent white, quivered around one splat in particular as though they were trying to show me something. A meter high, the irregular shape had been left by something large and bloodied where it hit the wall.

  Mom?

  A wave of nausea sent me rolling away from the unfolding scene. My face met the hem of Alabastair’s cloak. He crouched, which made the cloak puddle on the floor, creating a tent. I wanted to pull the lush, heavy fabric around me and burrow deeper.

  “Clementine, can you sense the dead?” he asked.

  I grabbed the velvet and pressed it to my eyes. I was about to put into words something I’d never shared with anyone. Lucky Alabastair. “I can sense things that happened in the past. It’s like there’re these loops in my head. Loops and loops of gossamer threads—story threads—with clusters of tiny, tiny knots. I tend to get lost in the knots.”

  Loosening my grip, I rolled again to face the wall and forced myself to open my eyes and expand my magical sense. Story threads often appeared
fluffy-edged, like the downiest part of a feather. What I could see and sense embedded into these magical threads—like insects caught in ancient amber—was my mother’s abduction.

  I couldn’t tell when it happened or if it was tied in any way to her death.

  I traced the movement of the threads with my fingers. “Something grabbed my mother, something large, with wings. The creature lifted her. She hit the wall. There was a struggle…” I lifted my gaze higher and pointed, following the upward sweep of the bloody streaks to the broken window. “I think whatever grabbed her took her out through the window.”

  Feeling nauseous, I again sought refuge in the folds of Alabastair’s cloak. His fingers were cool as he touched the side of my face and cleared my hair out of the way. “Your aunt should be here,” he said. “She witnesses things most of us cannot see, on an almost daily basis. She would want to help you, Clementine. And be of comfort.”

  “But it’s late,” I said, wishing for the warmth of my favorite blanket, my dog’s thick, soft fur, and the ignorance of the first half of the day.

  “She prefers to work well into the night.”

  With that, Alabastair encouraged me to get off the floor.

  “Rosey, Beryl?” My sisters were clustered around the desk with Kostya and the water mage. I had to raise my voice and call them a second time before they heard me. “Can you come here?”

  Beryl raised her wand as she strode toward me, coaxing the flame-shaped light bulbs on all of the chandeliers to increase their wattage. Alderose stuck a finger in the belt loop on the back of my jeans and drew me against her side.

  I took a deep breath. “I want to show you something.”

  “What’d you find, Sissy?” Beryl asked.

  “Clues to something that happened to Mom in this room.” My sisters crowded closer. I gestured to the wall and listed the things we could all see—the water stains, the bird droppings, and the streaks of blood. I explained what they were before adding descriptions of the bits that only I could see.

  “Are you sure the blood is human or Magical and not animal?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what makes you think it’s Mom’s blood?”

  My rib cage began to tremble. “As long as I can remember, I’ve seen these things I call story threads and they never seem to be about the living. They’re always tied to those who have passed over,” I said, peeling away the protective wrapping I had stretched over my gift. Or my curse. I searched for words to explain what it was like when my magic activated.

  “Do either of you see threads floating in the air? Threads that make up…sketches, like what Rémy showed us when he painted the air downstairs and we all saw Mom’s hand and the ring?” I asked.

  Alderose shook her head and Beryl let out a short, “Nope.”

  “Water acts as both a magnifying lens and a memory-keeper.” Rémy’s sudden appearance at my back startled me. I shuffled closer to Alderose and craned my neck to watch the mage as he spoke. “Every natural element has the capacity to retain memories. Mages like myself spend years developing the ability to extract memories from our element—in my case, water—without damaging or altering the memory. Ethics discourage us from editing or interpreting the information to suit whatever outcome would most benefit us.

  “What I did downstairs was use water to draw forth pertinent memories from my meeting with your mother.” Rémy’s gaze as he looked down at me was almost sympathetic. Almost. “You are obviously not a mage, but it appears you have been blessed by my goddess, Mnemosyne. I am curious to know what it is you see.”

  “I smelled the rain first,” I said, sweeping my arm back and forth to encompass the wall and the window, and the hole in the glass.

  “Ahh, the trigger,” Rémy murmured. “Continue.”

  “Then I noticed the broken glass and the bird droppings and smelled…death. Those brownish-red stains popped off the wall and as soon as I realized it was old blood, the story began to play out.”

  “What story, Sissy?” Beryl asked.

  Fear constricted my vocal cords. “Mom. She was grabbed over there,” I said, pointing to the wall to the right of the doorway. “She was bleeding when she hit the wall over here and she was probably injured even more when she was dragged through the window.” I took in another deep breath and blew it out. A distinctive patterning in the threads at the periphery of my vision resembled the sweep of feathers across the wall. “Whatever took her had wings.”

  “And you can see all that? You can see Mom?”

  “I can’t actually see Mom,” I said, frustrated by the gaps in my magic and my inability to paint a clear picture for my sisters. “I see the places where fluids were being, I don’t know, fluid-y. I think Rémy’s right. The rain triggered this aspect of my magic. Blood’s a fluid. Bird shit’s a fluid.” I turned to my sisters and the others. Everyone was staring at the wall.

  “This is the first breakthrough we’ve had, Clementine,” Kostya said. “But I hate that you’re seeing what might have happened to your mother.”

  Alderose murmured, “I hate to think that Mom suffered.”

  “Me too.”

  “What kind of a creature has wings and is strong enough to lift a human?”

  “Certain shifters.”

  “Gryphons.”

  “Dragons.”

  “Demons.”

  “Kostya?”

  He shook his head, troubled. “I doubt any demon from the Reformed Realm would have attacked Moira Brodeur.” Years ago, Kostya had made an effort to explain the handful of demonic realms to me. Some of the realms didn’t bother at all with creating relationships with humans or other Magicals. Some, like the Reformed Realm, were populated with demons dedicated to maintaining their autonomy, confining their battles to those with equal strength and power.

  Kostya had joked that humans broke too easily and presented very little challenge to the average demon. I had laughed. Kind of.

  “I’ll explain to my mother what you’ve seen, Clementine. She’s very, very good at extracting information.” He chuckled softly. “She didn’t become Queen of the Reformed Realm by giving out lollipops.”

  “I think we should move away from the wall and the bird droppings, given what might have caused the infection in Serena. Though these do appear to be quite old.” Alabastair drew our attention off of the splattered wall and guided us toward the center of the room. “Before Mr. Ruisseau finishes telling us about his meeting with Moira, I would like to hear from the sisters how they learned of their mother’s death.”

  Beryl slipped her arm around my waist as I wavered on my feet. The most recent story threads had given me the strongest, most disturbing visions to date. A sensation of disassociation lingered in my body, making me feel woozy.

  Alderose paced, keeping her gaze on her boots as she spoke. “Serena contacted me first, maybe because she knew I was living in Boston at the time and could get here quickly. I called Beryl. I couldn’t reach Clementine.

  “Serena didn’t offer many details over the phone, only that Mom had died and that her body was in a local funeral home. She was borderline hysterical, now that I think about it. It could be that I filled in the missing details in my head, just to…to cope with the news.”

  “Did she mention where Moira had been found,” Alabastair asked, probing gently, “or what was said about the manner of her death? And what about your father?”

  “No.” Alderose stopped pacing and kicked at a table leg. “Mom and Dad hadn’t seen each other since mid-May, after Clemmie’s graduation. The only thing I know—and these are Mom’s words verbatim—is that she was working on a very complicated project and Dad was off gathering supplies for the shop. When she said complicated, I thought she was talking about one of her embroideries or lace pieces.”

  Beryl affirmed what Alderose said. “I was traveling through Scotland. I was able to get to Glasgow and the main portal hub. I drove here from Boston and met Rosey and Dad downstairs, in the apartment.”
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br />   When the call came in I was relaxing on a remote beach in Yelapa, México. The owner of the rustic, open-air palapas had rousted me out of my folding lounger and hustled me into a fume-spewing water taxi. Forty-five minutes of bouncing off waves got me to Puerto Vallarta, cell phone reception, and the devastating news.

  “It took me longer to get here.” I swallowed hard. Guilt was hurling balls of acid up my throat. “The portal in Puerto Vallarta was under repair, and I had to take a bus to México City. The days after my graduation ceremony were the last time I saw Mom alive.”

  Alderose picked up the story again. “While Beryl and I waited with our father for Clementine, we handled arrangements with the funeral home. The owners are Magicals and they’re used to dealing with all manner of creatures. I don’t recall them saying they’d seen anything unusual about Mom’s—” Rosey had to compose herself before she added, “Mom’s remains.”

  “Remains?” I asked, incredulous. It was good Beryl had a tight grip on me. Remains made it sound like Mom had arrived at the funeral home in pieces, and that visual was—

  “Her body, Clemmie. Remains is the word they used. By the time you arrived in Northampton, she’d been embalmed and was in the viewing room. Remember?”

  Memories of that day hit me like a rogue wave. What had rocked me the most about viewing my mother at the funeral home was how much her face and hands looked molded from wax.

  I finally responded, “How could any of us forget?”