Ribbing and Runes

by Nancy Warren

  “Do you really think we’ll find the elixir?” Jennifer asked. She was in the back seat with Lochlan, and I was in the front, sitting beside Rafe. I wasn’t sure who she’d addressed the question to, but it was Rafe who answered after a slight pause.

  “I think it’s too easy.”

  That was interesting because I had sort of felt the same way. However, once Sylvia had made a decision, it was easier to follow along than argue with her. Besides, she could be right and all we had to do was dig in the right place to find the witch’s secret stash of eternal youth. And, while we were there, we might want to slip inside Karmen’s house and have another look around. I was positive that there was something we’d missed. Some clue that would tell us who’d murdered her.

  Fortunately, Karmen’s property was far from anyone else, so it would be very unlikely that neighbors would alert the police to strange goings-on. Still, we took no chances. We parked on the road leading up to her drive rather than turning into the drive itself. This meant that we had to walk down her private lane. Naturally, the vampires had excellent night vision, so it wasn’t like we needed flashlights. My night vision wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t vampire-accurate. There was a moon, but it was partly covered by clouds. I had an eerie feeling.

  Jennifer came up beside me and said, “This place gives me the creeps,” and I knew she was feeling it too.

  Then we stopped. Rafe had held up his hand. He turned and said softly, “Do you hear that?”

  I strained my ears. I have pretty good hearing, but I didn’t hear anything. Wait. It sounded like gravel shifting.

  Sylvia looked at Rafe. “Someone’s here before us.”

  Chapter 18

  Rafe said, “Wait here. I’ll go first.”

  Sylvia stepped forward. “I’m coming with you.”

  He didn’t argue, and the two of them crept silently forward.

  Sylvia suddenly turned and whispered, “Lucy, you’d better come too.”

  I started to follow her, and Jennifer said, “Well, I’m not being left here all by myself with a bunch of vampires,” and then she came along. In truth, I don’t think she cared about being left with the vampires. She didn’t want to miss anything.

  I could feel Hester’s restlessness behind me. I knew that if it had been anyone but Sylvia who told her to stay put, she’d be following us too. But Sylvia did command obedience in Hester, and based on the fact that they were all doing as she told them, I guessed she commanded obedience from all of them.

  As we walked between the pub and the cottage, the sound grew louder. It was like metal scraping on stone. We moved forward, behind the pub and cottage, to where Karmen’s land stretched out quite far. The gardens were pretty, and behind them was a structure rising out of the ground, looking ghostly in the moonlight.

  Patrick Herrick had said there was a mausoleum on the land. This must be it, though there was no church nearby and no other graves that I could see. The mausoleum looked old, and there were two stone swans on Roman plinths guarding the entrance. Rafe went up two stairs and to a stout wooden door that locked. Except the door was standing open, and as we grew closer, the noise grew more distinct. There was someone in there. When he eased the door open, I caught the gleam of light.

  Even though I was not alone and with some powerful creatures, my heart still began to pound.

  We walked in. I think that Rafe had motioned to me and Jennifer to stay back, but naturally we pretended we hadn’t seen him. I might be nervous, but I wasn’t going to miss the excitement.

  It was a mausoleum, or had been. I could just make out the shelves, which I was happy to see were empty of bodies, coffins or ashes. It would have been easy to miss the second door because it was set into the wall, but this too was open. And there were stone stairs leading down into who knew what. But from down below, there was light gleaming up.

  Rafe went down the stairs first, Sylvia following close behind. We crept down afterwards, me first and then Jennifer bringing up the rear. The stairs were stone and quite smooth, as though they were in frequent use. Not crumbling and falling apart like I would have expected. This must be the crypt, and I sincerely hoped it was as empty as the mausoleum.

  The stairs bent around a corner, and as I went around the bend, the light was so bright, it almost blinded me. There were fluorescent lights overhead. I could smell the dampness and dankness of being underground in a stone vault.

  Any coffins or bodies that had been interred down here had been removed, and I was looking at an alchemist’s laboratory. Even though I’d never seen one before, I immediately recognized what it was. A gas stove sat in the middle, and there were shelves with beakers, mortars and pestles, jars of all kinds of strange-looking ingredients. But more extraordinary was the woman muttering in the corner.

  “Where is it? What have you done with it? Must be here.”

  Even from the back, I recognized her. “Tilda?”

  She swung around. Her hair was wild. Her eyes were wild.

  She looked at all of us, then her gaze focused in on Sylvia. “Why aren’t you dead? You should be dead.”

  I could feel Sylvia holding her natural fury in check. I didn’t know how much time we had till she blew. But I certainly hoped enough time to figure out exactly what was going on here.

  I asked, “Why should she be dead?”

  “Because I put enough arsenic in that preparation you bought from Karmen to kill an elephant.”

  The preparation that was meant for me.

  She was admitting it? “You killed Karmen. Why?”

  She laughed, a strange, brittle laugh. “Look at me. I’m old and frumpy. I have worked for that witch for twelve years, and she never aged a day while I grew lined and wrinkled. I begged her for her secret, but she claimed it was in her skin creams and I must be using them wrong. Did she think I was a fool?”

  Too bad Karmen didn’t figure out her assistant was crazy.

  “Oh, I suspected sorcery. I suspected witchcraft. But it wasn’t until she came”—and she pointed at Sylvia here—“and I heard them whispering that I finally understood what was going on. She was an alchemist. And she had the secret elixir of life. That’s what she was doing. She had made the elixir of life, and she wouldn’t share it with me.” She made a sound like a shriek. “Did she think I stayed for the paltry wages? I wanted youth. I wanted another chance at the life I’d wasted.”

  Sylvia’s eyes were beginning to flash, and I saw Rafe put a gentle hand on her wrist. He knew me well enough to know that I was pretty good at getting people to talk. I was young and unassuming. And I had a way of sounding like I was genuinely interested. Well, I was genuinely interested. Why on earth would this woman have killed her boss? But I was beginning to see why.

  “So she wouldn’t share her secret of eternal youth and beauty with you?” I asked.

  “All she had for me was a bad wage and her contempt. So after your friend here offered a huge sum for a piece of her philosopher’s stone, I knew the source of her youth. All I had to do was find it.”

  “But I don’t understand. Was Karmen’s recipe bad? Or did you add the poison?”

  “I did it, fool. She was too crafty to let me see where she kept her elixir of life. But she came with that box and, as she always did, got me to do her dirty work. She said to wrap it up nicely and package it and you’d be by to pick it up.” Here she pointed at Sylvia.

  “When she was out, I went snooping through her house. I went through everything. And then I found her key. The key to her secret laboratory. But the stone wasn’t there. The poison was, though. Arsenic. So I added a liberal dose to the powder before I wrapped it up.”

  “Why didn’t you just keep that stone for yourself?” Sylvia asked. I’d been wondering the same thing. It was the logical thing to do.

  Her eyes flashed. “Because she’d have known I took it. Besides, I didn’t just want enough for myself. What’s the point of living forever if you’ve got no money? I could make a fortune selling you
th to others rich enough to pay my price.”

  Sylvia had settled down now and was calmly listening.

  “I knew it was here, you see. I knew her stone had to be here and her recipe to make more. But she grew suspicious of me. I probably asked too many questions. I could feel her watching me all the time. I needed to search her cottage and search the grounds. I had to find the stone and the laboratory that I knew was here, and the recipes.”

  She banged her fist against the stone wall. “I didn’t grow careless. She tricked me. Telling me she was going out, even driving away. I resumed my search, and she caught me in her study, going through her papers. She fired me. Me. After all I’d done for her.”

  She still seemed stunned that Karmen hadn’t wanted to keep employing an assistant who’d paw through her personal papers when she wasn’t home.

  “I left, pretending to be sorry. I even returned her keys, but I had another set. It was easy enough to let myself into her cottage when she was out and put arsenic in her special tea.”

  I remembered that special tea that we’d drunk that day. I swallowed hard.

  “Then I waited. She always had her special tea every day at three o’clock. So I made sure I was here around that time. Once she was dead, I knew I’d have the place to myself and I could search at my leisure. I carried on working so no one would suspect me. No one knew Karmen had fired me.” Now she glared at me and Rafe. “Innocent, hard-working Tilda. Then you two arrived, pushing your way in. Interfering, meddling bride. And you brought the police before I was ready for them.”

  I didn’t have a clue what to say, so kept my mouth shut.

  She didn’t seem to care. She went on. “But they soon left, after stomping through her house and things with their big boots.”

  She turned to Rafe, then. “But you did me a favor with your interest in the stencils in the kitchen.” She cackled. “Oh, she was a cunning one. The secret was there, on her kitchen walls. Her cellar below the swans. I found her laboratory.” She spread her arms and gazed around.

  Then her face twisted with fury. “But it’s not here. There’s nothing here.”

  “That must be disappointing for you,” I said. “I guess she moved everything when she knew you were onto her. I bet you’ll never find it.”

  She screamed then. A scream of rage and frustration that echoed off the dank walls. She reached behind her and picked up what looked to me like an old service revolver. From maybe World War I. Not that I was any expert on guns, but that thing was not new. Where on earth had she found it? Worse, was it loaded? Did she know how to use it?

  She waved it around at us.

  She looked at Sylvia and with a nasty sneer said, “Well, you wanted to live forever. Try doing it underground.”

  And then, waving the gun in our general direction, she backed herself up the stairs and flipped off the light.

  We were plunged into total darkness. And then I heard the slam of a door and the turning of a key. And then the echo as the second door slammed. There was complete silence for a moment. Both Jennifer and I managed to get our phones out and the flashlight app on at about the same time.

  Sylvia said with contempt, “What a ridiculous villain.”

  Jennifer looked at me, and I looked at her. She said, “How’s your door-opening spell?”

  I was pleased to say that it was quite good. I’d been practicing.

  She said, “After you, then.”

  I couldn’t imagine how terrifying it would have been to be locked down here in normal circumstances, but any one of the four of us could have broken out without any problem at all. I sort of appreciated that Sylvia and Rafe stood back and let us witches handle it. Lighting my way with my phone flashlight, I got to the top of the stairs and found the light switch and turned it on.

  I whispered my unlocking spell and had the pleasure of hearing the soft click as the lock released.

  Out of courtesy, I let Jennifer use her spell to open the outer door. It wasn’t any quicker than mine, but it did the job.

  As he came up behind us, Rafe switched out the light.

  Sylvia looked quite put out. “Now I suppose we’ll have to find her.”

  Tilda had, of course, run straight into the other vampires. Carlos had hold of her gun, and they were marching her back towards where we’d come from. She was arguing with them that she had no idea what they were talking about, and then she saw us come out of the mausoleum and screamed.

  “How did you get out? This is witchcraft. That’s what this is. You’re monsters!” And then she broke away and began to run. Rafe pushed Carlos’s hand down, not that he was in any danger of shooting the woman.

  “What shall we do?” I asked, watching the woman run toward the woods at the end of the property.

  “One of us will have to take care of her,” Sylvia said quite sharply. “We can’t have her raving about alchemists and witches and monsters.”

  “She’ll probably just end up sectioned under the Mental Health Act,” Lochlan said.

  “I don’t like it. Too dangerous,” Sylvia said.

  Rafe looked at me. “Lucy, what do you think?”

  “Well, you can’t murder the woman. I agree with Lochlan. We’re just going to have to hope that no one believes her. If you ask me, she’s completely insane anyway.”

  I could barely see the woman now, still running, still screaming, but then it seemed like she tripped, and we heard a strangled cry.

  I ran forward, but of course I was no match for the strength and night vision of vampires. By the time I got to where they were standing, the woman was crumpled on the ground.

  “What happened?” Jennifer asked.

  Rafe glanced up. “She must have tripped in her haste. She hit her head on a rock.”

  “Is she…?” I couldn’t finish. I felt the darkness of death, and I knew that Jen did too.

  “She’s dead. Yes.”

  “Well, that’s convenient. But what shall we do with her?” Sylvia asked. “You can’t just leave dead women lying all over the ground.” Then she seemed to think. “At least, not in these times.”

  Alfred stepped forward. “I can’t think of a better place to put her than in the crypt.”

  It was a brilliant idea. We’d put her at the bottom of the crypt stairs, leave the doors unlocked, and it would look like an accident. Of course, by the time dawn came, every scrap of alchemist equipment would have been removed, and she’d be found lying in an empty crypt.

  Luckily, we had the truck.

  Rafe said, “I’ll drive Lucy and Jennifer back to town.”

  “But we can help,” I said.

  He shook his head firmly. “If anybody comes, we can disappear easily. You’d just be a hindrance.” Rude, but true.

  He turned to the others. “While I’m gone, get everything out of the crypt and into the truck.” He paused for a moment. “And find some supplies for making creams and so on. If there aren’t enough in the old pub, find some somewhere and stack them in the crypt so it looks like Tilda was retrieving supplies from the storeroom when she slipped and fell.”

  “Excellent,” Lochlan said. “You get on, and we’ll have this done in no time.”

  To Jennifer and me, he said, “And you two should get a few hours of sleep.”

  Chapter 19

  “That’s quite the knitting club you have,” Jennifer said when we were back at the flat. I put on the kettle, knowing it would be a while before we could sleep. Both of us needed some time to decompress.

  “I know. You really got the full-on vampire knitting club experience.”

  “Do you think they’ll be able to put her at the bottom of those stairs so it looks like an accident?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  She thought about it for a second. “I guess they’ve had some experience trying to make deaths look accidental that really weren’t.”

  I shuddered. I didn’t really want to think about that. Instead, I said, “How about some herbal tea?”

  “
Sure.”

  While I brewed the tea, she paced up and down my living room. Nyx came downstairs, yawning, to see what was going on. I’d thought she might be out, but I almost got the feeling she’d been waiting for us to come home. Jennifer barely broke stride and bent to pick up the cat and hoist her over her shoulder. There was nothing Nyx enjoyed more. And the two of them paced back and forth. I watched them from my kitchen, filled with affection for the pair of them. I mean, I’d always had a special relationship with Jennifer, but now it seemed like we had something even more special in common.

  I brewed a special calming tea for us, knowing that we’d be having a hard time getting to sleep since we were both so wired.

  I came out of the kitchen with the two mugs of tea and caught her as she turned from the end of the room and came back towards me. “Smells great,” she said, sniffing appreciatively.

  “Hopefully it will help us sleep.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  Yeah, I’d pretty much got that, since she’d been pacing up and down. I had the same habit. It seemed to help me think too.

  She said, “It’s great that we figured out who killed that witch, but we definitely need to break the spell on that alchemy book. It was obviously Karmen’s.”

  I’d been thinking, too. I looked at her. “You don’t think it would be smarter just to destroy it?”

  Shock showed in her face and stopped her in her tracks. “Lucy, she went to a lot of trouble to protect it. I even think she made sure it ended up with Rafe. Didn’t you say that it was kind of mysterious that he ended up with the book?”

  I nodded. “The people in New Zealand that he supposedly bought it from didn’t know anything about it.”

  She shook a finger at me. “That’s witchcraft right there.”

  I set the two mugs of tea down on the table. “But why would Karmen want Rafe to have her spellbound alchemy book?”

  “I don’t know that yet. I have a couple of theories. One, he’s known to be an expert in that area, and it would be such a curiosity, she’d know that he would keep it. Then she could come back and get it. Because she obviously distrusted her assistant.”