Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1)

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  Gosha’s mother grunted.

  “Elsie, what a reckless thing to say to a young witch.” She pointed a nagging finger at Gosha. “Don’t go crazy. Cast too many spells in too short a time and you will suffer spellshock.”

  “Spellshock? What’s that?”

  Her mother swatted her away with the back of her hand.

  “Don’t cast too many spells and you won’t find out.”

  Gosha stamped down the urge to scream at her mother and looked at the time. Three o’clock. Miranda expected her for dinner at the club at seven. If George was out of the house, she could return home and deal with Cressida. Perhaps she could make her realize what Margrave had planned for her.

  From the living room came a squeal of young pain and a blubbering of miserable tears.

  “Boys.” Gosha, rushed over to crying Timothy and gathered him into her arms. “What happened?” She bounced him up and down on her hip to soothe him, but he was getting big. Soon she wouldn’t be able to lift him.

  “Edmund pushed me,” he wailed.

  “He knocked into me.”

  “Let me see.” Timothy turned the side of his head toward her. There was no visible injury. “Let me kiss it. Is that better?”

  “Yes,” he said in his tiny voice.

  “Good boy.” She put him down on the carpet. “Edmund, you have to be more careful. Look out for your brother.”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  She wanted more than anything to stay and roll around with them on the floor. The thought of what lay ahead made her weak at the knees. Breaking every promise she had ever made to herself, she had entered her mother’s madness. It was everything she had always feared. People she cared for were being taken from her by someone a thousand times worse than the man who had taken her into the dark. George had become a monster. She could hide behind her mother’s skirts and beg her to help, to rescue her from the dark the way she had before, but what then? The dark always returned. She had been running away from herself her entire life and, without her knowing, the darkness had seeped in around her.

  A tiny hand wrapped its fingers around hers.

  “What’s the matter, Mummy?” said Edmund, his sweet little face turned up toward her.

  “Nothing, sweetie.” She ruffled his hair. “Mummy has some business she needs to take care of. Mamusha, will you keep the boys safe? I don’t want George to…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence in front of the children.

  The witches exchanged a look.

  “Yes, Małgorzata, we’re family. You don’t have to ask. They’ll be safe with me.”

  31

  She parked the car at the other end of Canterbury Gardens, two streets away from the house, and took her time to walk home, her fingers curled around the lipstick. Contact with the talisman opened up an entire other sense, a different way of experiencing herself and the world around her. Within her body and without, she could sense the tidal flow of Influence. It had a quality she could only describe as intelligence, as if she waded through warm water that moved with her rather than resisting and holding her back. Each step became lighter and freer, each thought that came to her mind was brighter and clearer. In any other situation, it would have been the greatest high she ever experienced.

  As she sidled up to her own house like a criminal, the talisman heightened her perceptions. Her vision became sharper, her hearing more sensitive. She peered up at the house from behind the cover of a beech tree two doors down on the other side of the street. George’s car was gone, a good sign he was still at the office, although she dreaded to think the harm he could do there.

  Her heightened senses from the lipstick talisman revealed nothing alarming about the house, although it was all so new, how would she know if they had? She had nothing to compare it to. The ebb and flow of the tides of Influence swirled about her and through her. Each house she passed exerted a pull, creating currents in the tide. She laid her hand against the trunk of the beech tree. Its own unique currents of Influence flowed beneath her palm, a steady surge that spread up and out to its branches and down into its roots. With her hand on it, the tree was part of her, like an umbrella she might hold up against the rain, or a hat on her head. The sensation dissipated as soon as she took her hand away. She could have spent hours immersed in this new awareness, but there were more pressing things that required her attention.

  As she crossed the road, a familiar hardness pressed in around her eyes, the first sign of an episode ready to descend upon her. After all the drama of the morning, she’d hoped the witch’s Betrayal might have spared her from them, but no. As her foot fell on the bottom step to her front door, the widow’s weeds returned in full force to spread like a blot of dark ink around the periphery of her field of vision. The smear spread at an alarming pace toward its full span. Someone in the house would be dead in a matter of minutes.

  The tides of Influence shifted. Waves of energy shuddered around her in a great sucking that pulled toward the house.

  Cressida.

  The front door was locked. She patted down her pockets. No sign of her house keys. She must have left them in the car with her handbag.

  “Cressida!” She pressed hard on the bell and hammered at the door, shouting the girl’s name at the top of her lungs. “Cressida, don’t do it!”

  No response. Cressida must have already read the incantation and inhaled the poison. She had to get inside the house.

  “Dammit!”

  She kicked the door with her boot in frustration as she realized she’d already forgotten about the spells her mother gave her only an hour ago. She could have been halfway up the stairs by now if she weren’t so distracted.

  The sheet of paper with her mother’s list of spells was in her pocket. She read the word for breaking to herself three times, shaping the sounds of each syllable in her mind, stuffed the paper back in her pocket, and took a deep breath. She touched the heavy security lock on the door.

  “Kattak.”

  The spell took hold much quicker than when she spoke the word for finding. The opening within her that the spell word triggered came without delay, the shape of it different from the finding spell, like the keyhole in a different lock, but the same sinuous ease spread through her body, a moment of suspension in warm ocean waters.

  The steel lock under her hand made a slicing sound, as if a blade of unimaginable sharpness cut through it, and the door swung open as she pushed.

  Inside, the turbulent sucking toward the second floor intensified. Had it been a real wind, anything not bolted down would have been pulled along with it, but the house remained still and quiet. The dissonance between her new senses and old jangled at her nerves.

  She dropped her handbag and ran upstairs. Not a fit woman, stairs would normally leave her winded, but with Influence to buoy her up, she covered two and three at a time without so much as a deep breath.

  She found Cressida in her room, collapsed across her bed, her eyes open and unfocused, her mouth agape as if to cry out. The widow’s weeds had stopped spreading, but at least they hadn’t vanished. There was still a chance.

  She remembered how weak Mick was in the visions, his life draining away as the room darkened around him, the terrible monster stirring at the limit of his awareness. This was happening to Cressida now. Gosha looked around the room, but there was no sign of the demon.

  A blue glow shone through the fabric of Cressida’s shirtsleeve, intensifying with each passing second, Margrave’s snare. Gosha dug her fingers into the sleeve and ripped it off at the shoulder, the cotton tearing to reveal the incandescent metal of the torc wrapped around the girl’s arm. She yanked it off her and held it away from her, but it made no difference. The bangle continued to brighten.

  She held it tight in her hand and said the word for breaking.

  “Kattak.”

  The keyhole within her opened and Influence rushed through it, but the process in the torc was too powerful for her spell to interrupt. The short, sharp burst
of Influence dissipated in the turbulence emanating from the bangle. She repeated the spell a second and third time to no effect, each iteration of the spell a finite burst with no accumulating power.

  What else could she do?

  The commotion at her mother’s house the previous night leaped into her mind. They had protected the house with a ring of salt. Praying to any god that might listen, she ran down to the kitchen and threw all the cupboards open in her frenzy to find her supply: half a canister.

  She placed the torc on the floor in the middle of the kitchen and traced a circle around it in salt, but it had no effect. The bangle continued to grow brighter. What else had her mother done to seal the house off from Margrave’s attack?

  She touched the salt and took out her crib sheet to read off the word for binding.

  “Barzhed.”

  An unfamiliar keyhole opened within her to allow Influence to flow through, but all the spell did was fuse the grains of salt into a hard ring.

  She gripped the lipstick tight, pointed it at the amulet and yelled at the top of her lungs.

  “Stop!”

  To bend the Influence flowing around her to her will, she summoned up every ounce of frustration and anger within her, exactly as she had on the village green. The power flowing around the room slowed, but it fought her, congealing into writhing tentacles of force that grabbed at the lipstick, trying to wrench it from her grasp.

  The torc dimmed a fraction.

  She held fast against the ghostly tentacles, but had no idea what to do with them. She had arrested the process, but if she lost her concentration, it would lurch back into motion with as much force as before.

  Around her, the room darkened as if storm clouds thick enough to turn day to night had covered the sun, though outside the sky remained clear. A chill ran down her back, and her flesh spasmed in rippling waves.

  The darkness in the corner by the fridge deepened and spread. Tendrils of oily blackness reached out of the gloom and snaked toward her like giant, mangled tree boughs spiked with thorns. Two vertical slits of yellow light pierced through the darkness and the branching tendrils beneath them solidified into a great, spiked maw, the jagged boughs becoming arms that stabbed out toward her.

  She screamed and fell back, losing control. The Influence surged back into life, whipping up into a blustering storm that ripped the dark apparition apart in its turbulence. On the floor, the torc glowed brighter and brighter, the glare forcing her to cover her eyes, and then fell dark.

  As the false darkness of the apparition faded and daylight returned to the kitchen, Gosha realized the widow’s weeds were gone.

  “Cressida!”

  She wept as she ran back up the stairs, but it was too late. The young woman’s skin was ashen, her cheeks sunken, a grimace of fear etched into her face.

  32

  The ambulance responded quickly, the local depot only a few minutes away. The police arrived soon after to question her. She already knew how it would go, what questions they would ask, what their conclusions would be. Though they performed their jobs efficiently, the police constables did little to hide their contempt when they heard the supposed cause of death from the ambulance workers. Scarcely an hour after Cressida’s death and the house was quiet as if the dreadful commotion never happened, her drained and discarded carcass carried off on the next step of its journey to its final resting place.

  Gosha sat in the kitchen, the torc still in its useless ring of fused salt in the middle of the floor. Four times now, she had seen the same demonic apparition: in her visions, in the photo of Mick from the video shoot, ripping through Mrs. Dearing’s telling card, and now in her own kitchen. A twisted creature made of bark and thorns with glowing yellow eyes, it was the same every time. Was it a creature doing Margrave’s bidding, or was it Margrave himself? She still had so many questions to ask her mother, still so much to understand.

  She squatted down over the fused ring of salt to inspect Margrave’s torc. The deadly bangle seemed innocuous, a garish piece of kitschy tat you might come across at a jumble sale or a New Age shop. She picked it up with her fingertips and tossed it on the table as if it might burn her.

  Her new second sight, powered by her lipstick talisman nestled in her palm, told her little. After Cressida’s death, the snare fell inert, the drifting flow of Influence eddying around it like tide pool seawater around a rock. She took the wode sump from around her neck and laid it next to it, its silver lattice writhing and rolling against the tablecloth. The wode sump had a different feeling altogether to the torc. To her second sight it was porous and receptive, like a sponge. Any trickles of Influence that brushed up against it were absorbed into its substance.

  The Edwardian clock on the credenza in the foyer struck its dissonant chimes six times. She had an hour to get over to the Cheyne Arts Club to meet Miranda. Looking down at herself, she realized she was still in her Byronic silk blouse, the same top she wore to meet Miranda yesterday before George, and Margrave, and the Queen of Secrets. Her clothes were stale and rank against her skin. She needed to change, to wash away the memory of the past hour and reclaim herself. If she was to wage war against the supernatural, she needed to look the part.

  * * *

  A bath would have been best, in water hot enough to scald her skin, with soap and a hard-bristled brush to scrape the taint of George from her body, but she didn’t even have time for a shower. A sponge and a sink full of lukewarm water would have to do. She did not, however, rush her makeup. After she finished painting the contours of her eyes in harsh lines of black and purple, the face of a warrior stared back at her from the mirror. With more time, she might have taken out her old makeup kit and fashioned something more elaborate. For now, a streak of oxblood across her lips from her talisman of power finished the job. She threw on her mainstay outfit, black jeans and a black Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt, and buckled on her winklepicker boots.

  She felt strong and powerful.

  She was a witch.

  * * *

  She arrived at the club just after sundown. The bacchanalia started early on September nights like this. Most of the hard-drinking club members were well into their second bottles of house wine before dinner service started. Tonight, the usual blare of music and raucousness was missing as she passed through the labia of Venus. The dining room was dark.

  Odd. She checked her watch. Dinner service started at six, and it’s turning seven.

  The door to the bar, a large and high-ceilinged room that made up more than half of the building’s ground floor, was closed. Unusual, unless there was a meeting or a performance. Not a soul walked through the common areas. The rest of the building was entirely quiet. Miranda was nowhere to be seen.

  Behind the saloon door, glass broke, and a woman groaned. The door was wide and heavy, sturdy like the building itself, with an old-fashioned iron latch instead of a doorknob. She clasped the handle, thumbed the latch open and pushed the door, opening it just a crack.

  Her limited view opened up to the back of the room where several overstuffed leather couches and armchairs sat in sociable squares about well-worn heavy wood coffee tables. Every stick of furniture in the club had to be built to last, or it wouldn’t survive a night of the abuse the club members could mete out. Tonight, the score of people she could see through the crack of the door stood or sat in silence, faces turned toward the small raised platform that served as a stage concealed from her view on the other side of the door.

  The stillness was unnatural. The people sat perched upright, backs straight, hands resting on laps. Those who stood were rooted to the ground, their arms dangling lifelessly at their sides. Oddest of all, no one was drinking or smoking.

  Her intrusion went unnoticed, so she slipped in, taking care to close and latch the door behind her. With her back to the wall, she did her best to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  On the stage stood a young woman in a white bustier and tulle tutu sticking out in jagged spikes from h
er body. Made up with white foundation and bright red apple cheeks like a porcelain doll, she, too, was motionless as she looked toward the other side of the bar by the French doors that opened onto the garden. The crush of bodies blocked whatever everyone was looking at from her view. As far as she could tell, everyone in the club building, staff and patrons, were clustered in the room with her.

  The woman’s voice groaned again, a moan pitched somewhere between pleasure and agony, a distressing sound that worried at Gosha’s nerves.

  She threaded her way toward the sound, stepping around people who ignored her as she passed. Everyone was in a trance.

  On a sofa across from the bar, the groaning woman lay back with one leg up over the arm, her skirt hiked up around her waist. A man in a suit went down on her, his head buried in her lap, her discomfort clear in her grimace and the tears that streamed down her face.

  “Gosha,” said a familiar voice from the bar behind her. “You made it.”

  Her body reacted before she did. Every muscle tensed, her heart pounding as adrenaline surged through her in a flood of shocked heat.

  George.

  33

  Behind the bar, in a navy turtleneck and suede jacket, George poured himself a martini.

  “Curious.” He took a sip as he walked out from behind the wooden countertop. “How did you get away from me? Is it something your mother taught you?”

  She slipped her hand in her pocket and gripped the lipstick. Her second sight opened and allowed her to perceive the Influence flowing through the room.

  The experience in George’s presence was different. The first time Influence enveloped her, on the village green outside the Queen of Secrets’ cottage, the flow of force had been a roiling, turbulent maelstrom. Ever since, it was calmer, tides and currents flowing this way and that, crossing over each other, merging and separating. Here in the bar, the flow of Influence within her remained unchanged, but everything outside was a thin and regimented current. Around George, the power condensed into an aura in the shape of a dense medieval suit of armor. Concentrated jets radiated from it to everyone around her, connecting them in a spider’s web with George at its center. The flow was so contained, so controlled, it almost slipped past her untrained perception.