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

by Coralie Moss

  14

  The foyer of my parents’ apartment was shaped like a half moon with matching tables to either side and a mirror over each. A long hall stretched toward a big room at the front of the building where a single window was positioned, dark as a sightless eye. Beyond it, Rémy’s storm raged.

  “My feet are freezing,” I said. “I need shoes. Or boots. I think Mom and I were close to the same size.”

  “Do you know where your mother’s room is, Clementine?” At my nod, Alabastair found my elbow and guided me down the hall.

  Silk, hemp, linen.

  All the scents I associated with my mom. The necromancer slid a door open. I went to my hands and knees. Mom loved her boots and she kept them organized. I recognized her red suede ankle boots and the tan-colored pair with the decorative fringe. The ones I wanted had flatter heels and laced up the front.

  “Found them,” I said, pulling the pair toward me.

  “Is there anything else you need?”

  “No, I’m good.” Though socks would have been nice, I could hear restless voices coming from the hall. Bas led us back to the foyer. I slid down the wall, sat, and wiggled into the footwear.

  Filling my mother’s shoes.

  Walking in my mother’s footsteps.

  Not going to cry.

  “Here’s the plan,” Alderose said, once Bas and I had rejoined the group hunkered down in the foyer. “We’re going to find Gosia and bring her here. And because we don’t really know who’s aligned with whom, Tía and Alabastair are going to portal to Uncle Malvyn’s and apprise him of the situation. Malvyn’s designed special restraint collars that work on Magicals. They’ll bring collars back with them.

  “Beryl and Kostya are going to stay here. That will allow them to monitor Rémy, and the portal, and anyone else that might show up. Including Dad. Beryl will safeguard the ring.”

  Alderose turned to me. “Clementine, you’re going to lead me and Laszlo through the tunnel.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’re going to find Gosia and Jadzia and any other beings like them and ascertain why Rémy is so determined to have her that he’s been willing to wait over seven years for our assistance.”

  I wasn’t convinced breaking up was the best approach. The fact that no one else raised an objection calmed me. Somewhat. Not completely.

  “Time check?”

  “Twenty-three-oh-five,” Laszlo said.

  “Everybody ready?”

  “Ready,” we answered in unison.

  Alderose stepped into the stairwell and gestured for Maritza and Alabastair to follow. “If it’s okay with you, Bas, I’d like to watch you create a temporary portal.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” he said. “Though I would ask that you save any technical questions for…for after.”

  My sister returned in under five minutes, triumph written across her face. “Alabastair really is a Portal Keeper,” she exclaimed. “Makes me think I want a job like that.”

  “Tell us about it later, Rosey. Give the ring to Beryl and let’s go.”

  “Clementine’s in a rush. How unusual.” Alderose passed the ring to Beryl. While she practiced waving her hand in front of the wall, I stuck my tongue out at the shortest, bossiest, most well-armed witch in the room.

  Beryl squeaked when the door to the cellar opened. I hugged her and Kostya. Laz stayed in the doorway until Alderose and I were on the stairs. As he followed, the door behind him closed and locked. We were cloaked in utter darkness. “Can you do that thing with your fingers?” I asked. “Kostya flicks his nails and makes flames.”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “I traded the fire abilities I was born with for ones that my mother felt were…missing within the ranks of her protectors.”

  “Oh. Is that why your hair’s white?”

  Laszlo drew his thick braid over his shoulder. “I prefer to call it polished silver, and yes, when I made the switch to Ice Demon, a number of things about my physiognomy changed.”

  “Anything you miss?” I asked as we negotiated the stairs in the dark.

  “Let’s save that discussion for one of our dates, Clementine.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But we still need light.”

  “I’ll use my phone.” A moment later, the surface of the stone tree loomed out of the darkness draping the far wall. Laz sucked in a breath. “That tree is ancient.” He walked close enough to touch the portal tree’s surface. “No, I’m wrong. It’s definitely old, but it’s been subsumed by calcite.”

  My demon impressed me with his science. “Are we ready?” Alderose asked. “Because Alabastair gave me two portal stones, one to get there and one to get us back here.”

  I felt for Laszlo’s hand, and my sister’s, and steeled myself for the customary sensation of being squeezed and tossed that came with portal travel.

  “We did it,” I whispered, as cool, damp air flowed over my exposed skin. Laz swept his phone’s light around the portal room and stopped at the mouth of the tunnel.

  “We’re going in there?”

  “After me. We’ll crawl.” I entered first. Alderose followed right behind. Her inner engine ran faster than mine and she kept landing her hands on my ankles. “Rosey, slow it down a bit. I have to feel my way forward.”

  “But you were just here,” she said.

  I corrected her. “I was here hours ago and I was a newbie. Now that I know what’s at the other end of this tunnel, I’m a lot less excited.”

  She laughed. “Gotcha. I’ll try to temper my enthusiasm.”

  “You do that.”

  I repeated what worked before. Swipe the air, plant that hand, move forward, swipe with the other hand. We didn’t talk again until the tunnel began its transition toward the water. “It slopes downward,” I said. “Nothing too radical. We should start to see the light coming in from the cavern soon.”

  Dread began to fill my belly. I had never been afraid of swimming, and I wasn’t now. I was afraid of Jadzia coming after me with her knives—or worse, both her and Gosia misreading our intentions and going after all three of us.

  “You okay, Clementine?” Laszlo’s voice was the warm blanket of comfort I needed.

  “I’m good,” I said, stopping. I leaned to the side. “Do you two see the green glow?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Alderose whistled softly. “I couldn’t do this without you, Clemmie.” She patted my calf.

  “And I’m glad you’re here.”

  Another couple dozen crawling steps and we arrived at the end of the tunnel. The same glow greeted us, and the same reflected light drew upside-down ripples across the ceiling of the cavern.

  “This place is amazing.”

  “Sure is.” I lowered onto my belly, propped my elbows on the wide landing, and peered over the side. The ledge was where I remembered it, only there were no friendly seeming threads coaxing me forward. I reviewed with Alderose and Laszlo how the threads had created a nest and the greaves and gauntlets.

  “Didn’t you say they also pulled you into the water, away from Bas and the tunnel?”

  “Not the threads,” I said. “Jadzia. Or maybe it was Gosia. I know Bas freaked. I freaked, but the threads making the armor and stuff on my body never felt ill-intentioned.” Unlike the two creatures. I pivoted my upper torso and spoke into the darkness behind me. The only thing I could see of Laz was the pale glow emanating from the carved symbols inlaid along his horns. “Do you two think we should we keep going?”

  “Laszlo and I are armed ankles to wrists. What concerns me is how we’re going to stick together once we’re in the water if there are no threads to bind us?”

  “Crap. I didn’t think about that,” I admitted. I bent my knees and waggled my mother’s boots in my sister’s face. “These’ll just weigh me down. Undo the laces and take them out. It’s not much but it’ll give us something to tie ourselves together.”

  “We’ll be a raft of Magicals. Like those otters you saw near Vancouver.” Alderose snorted and be
gan to tug at the laces. Laszlo broke his silence with a comment about his concern with my lack of weaponry.

  “With you two nearby, nothing can get to me,” I said.

  “Take this. It’ll make me feel better.” Laszlo passed a short, sheathed dagger forward. I made a show of tucking it into the bralette, right between my breasts.

  “Thanks, Laz.” Boots off, I pulled myself into a ball and swung one leg over the end of the tunnel until I could free the other leg and hang there. My toes met the top step and I let go. I talked my sister through the same actions. She was quickly followed by Laszlo, who still wasn’t saying much of anything.

  “You okay?” I asked, once he’d gotten his footing. “We can tie ourselves together before we get into the water.”

  That was the last bit of wisdom I had to offer.

  Ropes whipped out of the water and lashed my sister and the demon to the rock wall. Thick threads formed a net around my body, pinning my arms to my torso and my legs together, and hauling me off the ledge and into the water backside first. More threads—angry, determined, rough—wove a mask over my head and across my face and ripped the cord holding the dampening charm off my neck. I screamed. The pull to reach for Laszlo was unbearable. I grabbed the thickening threads winding their way down the front of my body and pulled, but they’d slipped underneath the jumpsuit and were fumbling for the knife.

  I was pulled under the surface and this time there was no Gosia or Jadzia to breathe life into my lungs.

  I blacked out, faster than fingers pinching the flame at the end of a candle.

  Recovering from my second abduction was nothing like it had been the first time. That was a cakewalk. This was hellish. I was bruised all over. My ribs hurt, my head hurt, even the roots of my hairs hurt. I’d been hauled around by my ponytail. My arms and legs were bound tight; the darkness around me was absolute. Worst of all, I was gagged. Bile burned at the back of my throat and I had to concentrate to keep from throwing up in my mouth.

  A body was wedged next to me. I tried to roll closer, tried to listen for breath, sniffing the air to catch its scent—or any scent.

  Alderose.

  Cloth moving against sand alerted me to my sister’s movements. She rolled toward me. Our heads touched. I pushed my tongue against the matted threads covering my face, pulled some of them inside my mouth, and chewed and bit until there was hole big enough I could stick my tongue out.

  Hysteria almost made me laugh. The sight of my tongue would really frighten whomever had taken us. I flopped away from my sister and concentrated on making a bigger hole around my mouth.

  The sensation of a small snake crawling up my outer thigh stopped me cold. I loved snakes. That said, water snakes were generally poisonous, and any snake conjured by Gosia would be programmed to abide by her wishes. I lay as still as I could as the slithering sensation traveled up my body and coiled itself around my neck.

  I whimpered when a thread wound its way over my chin and lower lip. When it tugged at the threads I’d been working to shred, I had one of those proverbial light bulb moments.

  Tía Mari made the jumpsuit for me. There was a reason she left out a front closure. She did that to protect me. And the thing that felt like a snake wasn’t a snake. It was a heavy thread, a master thread, spelled by my aunt and doing what she asked it to do.

  Or so I hoped.

  I exhaled in gratitude, then froze. The snakelike thread mimicked my actions before it shrank, retracting down my body until I lost the feel of its location in the glare of the light shining right into my eyes.

  “Trying to chew your way out of this, Clementine?”

  “Yes. We came here to warn you, to help you.”

  “Is that so? Weren’t you instructed to go home, forget we existed, and especially to never contact us again?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You have put us in danger, Clementine Brodeur. Which gives us no other recourse.”

  Water lapped against the pebbly sand, beating out the moments. The fine, net-like mask covering my eyes made it impossible to see clearly, and I couldn’t tell by their voice if it was Gosia or Jadzia speaking. How was I going to negotiate us out of this predicament?

  “No other recourse about what?” I asked. I turned my head and spat out the bits of thread clinging to the sides of my tongue. I wasn’t very successful.

  “We’re taking you and your sister with us.”

  “Where’s our friend?”

  “The demon?”

  “Yeah, Laszlo.”

  “Laszlo is tied up at the moment.”

  I pressed my eyelids closed. I had to clamp down on my body’s wholly new, wholly instinctual response to go to the demon and make sure he was okay. The charm Mari had given me, the one that muted the Demesne’s influence, was either tangled in Gosia’s threads or floating slowly to the bottom of water-filled cavern. The channel in my brain devoted to the connection between me and my Demesne was clamoring, loud and clarion-like, inside every cell.

  Laszlo. Laszlo.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  One of them laughed, a cruel edge to her voice. Jadzia. “How stupid do you think I am?” She crouched next to me and rubbed her hand across my face. The threads responded by creating a stronger gag and reinforcing the area around my eyes. “We’re leaving now.”

  She—or one of their group—grabbed the fabric behind my neck and dragged me along the ground. They picked up Alderose at the same time. Every other step, her body bumped against mine. She whimpered once. I longed to free my fingers and hold on to her, any part of her. I was starting to feel like all of this was somehow my fault.

  It was me that had urged my sisters to gather in Northampton to meet with the lawyer, rather than having only one of us make the trek to Massachusetts and represent the others.

  Once we agreed to assemble, it was me that pushed for us to make the time to go through Mom’s shop together. I wanted the three of us to touch her things, tell stories, donate pieces of our childhoods to a verbal memory quilt. With each of us following very different paths, we hadn’t spent quality time together since our mother’s death.

  It was—and always had been—me who pushed, me who jumped first, me who considered consequences as an afterthought. And my family had always been there to catch me.

  The hand holding the neck of my coveralls was entangled with some of my hair. My scalp was stinging. I had no patience for self-pity, but it hurt. So did my entire backside. And so did my heart. The thread I identified as one of Tía Mari’s slithered up my leg then my belly and coiled itself underneath my collarbone, comforting me with its steady thrumming.

  My eyes watered even more.

  The being dragging us stopped, dropping me without warning. My head thudded against the ground. We were shoved onto a boat. Fabric flapped overhead, muffling the sounds of preparation. The vessel was narrow and I tilted toward my sister’s body.

  This could work in our favor. Closed in as I was, I opened my senses to any story threads that might have been able to cling to me, opened myself to the potential my aunt had stitched into the soaked coveralls, and drew a picture in my head.

  Little scissors, little knives, sharp points, cutting away at the bad threads keeping us unable to see, unable to speak, unable to touch or communicate. I asked for help and swore I’d never jump again without considering all the ramifications of my actions.

  I backed down from the enormity of that promise. I swore instead to try to modify my behavior, to temper my joy and enthusiasm and think things through, to get a handle on the idea of reviewing the possible consequences of my actions before actually acting on my urges.

  Alderose’s head bumped against my forehead. She pressed into me and whispered, “Clemmie, stop grinding your teeth.”

  Heart pounding, I smiled at no one and nestled closer, hoping my mouth was somewhere close to one of her ears. “Rosey, you’re okay.”

  “I’m not okay. My head hurts like a bitch and there’s sand in
my underwear.”

  I laughed as softly as I could. “They captured us.”

  “No shit.”

  That reignited the fires of guilt burning a hole in my gut and pretty effectively shut me up. Humor wasn’t going to get us out of this.

  “Clemmie? I’m sorry. You remember how much I always hated getting sand in my bathing suit?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  “This is a thousand times worse because I have my period.”

  “Channel your rage, sister.”

  She snorted. We were good.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I’m done with making plans. My plans get us hog-tied, dragged through water, and tossed into boats.”

  “Then what’s your gut telling you?”

  “That I’m really stressed.”

  “And?”

  “And that Tía is really smart. She stitched sentient threads into this jumpsuit.”

  I could hear Alderose considering what I meant by sentient threads, and I felt it when she went from being skeptical to accepting. “I think all of my weapons are intact.”

  “But…how?”

  My sister’s silence spoke volumes. I knew she had a lifelong fascination with knives and I was proud she’d channeled it into studying aikido and other martial arts that revered and utilized swords in their practices. If Rosey’s studies had taken a magical turn, that was news she hadn’t shared.

  “I—I can use glamour. My girlfriend’s fae.”

  My jaw would have dropped open if it wasn’t bound shut. I wasn’t surprised my sister had a girlfriend—she was openly and gloriously bisexual. It was her admission that she was dating a fae. The fae were on a whole other level of magic. Fae had their own realms, like the Demons. Fae—at least as far as I’d gathered from secondhand encounters and hearsay—were not beings unschooled witches like myself should be tangling with.

  “What does using glamour have to do with your daggers?”

  “It allows me to hide them.”

  “Why’d she do that for you?”

  “I—I did something for her.”

  “What’d you do?”

  Silence blended with the rocking back and forth as our watercraft continued its journey to wherever it was we were being taken.