Myths and Magic: An Epic Fantasy and Speculative Fiction Boxed Set

by K.N. Lee

  With a racing heart, I turned the knob and slowly creaked open the old door. Aunt Vivian was sitting just across the foyer in her rocking chair, sound asleep.

  “Shh.” I warned the others to be quiet when they followed my steps, and I waved in her direction to be sure they saw her.

  “Should I restrain her?” Samuel whispered. “Or do you want me wait until you’ve already done it?”

  “Just wait,” I told him. I didn’t know if it was even going to work, but if it did I didn’t know if he would suffer if he was touching during the exchange.

  We silently crept over to her, and Samuel inched between the back of the chair and the wall behind it, arms hovered over her shoulders ready to hold her down with his protected hands if there was any trouble. Camille and Jenny both collected household items to use as weapons. Camille had a broomstick and Jenny found an old, thick spell book. Blocking all paths of escape, they took their places, one on each side of me, and closed in on her.

  My arms were only half stretched out in front of me, and if I could bring myself to extend them more, I could easily touch her exposed arms. I held myself in that position, trying to gather the courage to keep going.

  “Eliza…” Samuel tried to pull me from my last minute self-doubt. “She could wake up any minute.”

  I shook my head, and a tear fell down my cheek. “I can’t do it.”

  “You’ve got to do it,” he pressed. “We can’t turn back now.”

  “I know,” I murmured. “I still want to do it. I just have to give her a chance to explain herself.”

  “How can she explain killing your parents?” Camille stressed the point.

  She was right, of course. There was no way Aunt Vivian could defend herself for that, not to me anyway. But I couldn’t do this to her without at least knowing why. And Samuel Heard it.

  “Damn it,” Samuel growled, and he slammed his hands down onto her, detaining her by the collar. “Wake up, witch.”

  She inhaled sharply and tried to bounce up from her seat, but Samuel pushed her back down.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded from me. “I told you that you weren’t welcome here anymore. What you’re doing is trespassing.”

  “Does it look as though I’m here for tea?” I sneered.

  She looked around the room. She was surrounded. “Marcus!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “What are you going to do? Are you going to kill me?”

  “No, Vivian. I’m not a murderer. I’m nothing like you.”

  “What the hell is going on?” After barreling down the stairway, Marcus flipped on the light switch when he reached the bottom. “Samuel? What are you thinking, man? Get your hands off her!”

  He tried to get to Vivian to help her, but I stepped in his way.

  “Eliza,” he growled. “Get out of my way. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  When I ignored him, he snatched up my shoulders and tossed me to the ground. Not with enough force to hurt me—he only wanted me placed out of the way. I think his restraint was motivated by knowing if he hurt me, his fate would be sealed. Samuel wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. The two had been in more than enough romps for Marcus to know he was no match for my keeper, especially not when it came to protecting me.

  “Marcus, stop,” Camille ordered. She cupped his face in her hands and tried to reason with him. “Do you honestly think we would be doing this if we didn’t have a good reason?”

  “Don’t listen to them!” Vivian shouted. “They’re trying to steal my place, that’s all this is about. They’re going to kill me!”

  I lay still on the ground, trying to anticipate his next move. He took a small step in her direction, but then took it back.

  The poor boy was torn between his matriarch and the two people he had shared a home with most of his life—people he had grown to love as if they were his brother and sister.

  “No.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I know Eliza well enough to know she doesn’t have the heart to kill anybody. Hell, she couldn’t even sacrifice that goat at the altar.”

  My heart warmed as he held out his hand to help me back to my feet.

  “Thank you,” I said gently.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he warned. He pointed his finger and ran it across the room at each of us. “You all had better have a damned good excuse for this, or I’m calling the cops.”

  “Tell him,” I ordered Vivian. “Tell him about my parents. And then tell me why.”

  Her face paled, and she looked up at Samuel. “But, you’re here. My spell didn’t work?”

  Samuel’s entire face clenched and his body stiffened at the mention of the spell that put his life in jeopardy. “I didn’t tell her. She figured it out.”

  She relaxed a little as if she thought perhaps we were talking about two different things.

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to,” she lied.

  Holding up a small satchel, I said, “Do you know what this is? It’s Revealing Dust. Now, it’s your choice. You can tell him just enough to get the point across, or I can use this and you will confess to every gruesome detail of your crimes. And I will make sure you don’t just stop with what applies to me.”

  Revealing Dust was a spell I had come across when I was looking for the Truth spell. It essentially was magic sand. If I breathed it onto her nostrils, she would be forced to answer every question I asked, and she wouldn’t be capable of leaving any part of the truth out. Lying by omission was still lying.

  I was bluffing, however. Besides not wanting to get mixed up in witchcraft, I didn’t have the ingredients I needed to make it. The bag was empty.

  Vivian stared fearfully at the worn out cloth satchel, but she pursed her lips and shook her head, giving me an unspoken refusal to comply.

  “All right then.” I pretended to dig at the strings that held the opening closed. “I have more than enough to keep you rambling until the police get here and can listen themselves.”

  “Damn it,” she said. “Get your boyfriend’s ox hands off of me and I’ll talk.”

  Samuel looked at me for permission, and I nodded. His tight face showed he was not happy letting her free, but with all of us here she wasn’t going to get away.

  “Why did you kill them?” I asked, my voice breaking.

  “I didn’t kill them,” she insisted.

  “Kill who?” Marcus was trying to catch up.

  “You bitch,” I spat. “Tell the truth! You owe me that much after everything you’ve done to me.”

  She jumped up from her chair so that we were face to face, eye to eye.

  “After all I’ve done to you?” she yelled, poking her boney finger into my chest. “You little brat! If it wasn’t for you, I would still be the Queen! And if those idiots hadn’t messed up twenty-four years ago, I wouldn’t even have had to deal with you at all!”

  “I didn’t come here to take your throne,” I screamed back at her. “I wanted to be a family. I didn’t care if I never used my magic again. I just wanted to be a family!”

  Tears were gushing from my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t even attempt it. I wanted her to feel how badly she had hurt me, hoping maybe just a little bit of her humanity was left to feel guilty for it.

  I was left longing for her sympathy when she started to chuckle. “What you are is an abomination! A mongrel! A keeper and a healer mating, who would stand for such blasphemy?”

  “My parents were ordered to create me!”

  “Your parents manipulated the Spirits! They appealed to Damballah’s desire for rebirth to get what they wanted.”

  “I think you should give the Spirits a little more credit than that, Vivian.”

  “They have weaknesses just the same as mortals do, believe me,” she said. I did believe her.

  “Regardless,” she continued, “I was prepared to wait until Marie left the throne. She didn’t have the stomach to rule. I wouldn’t have waited long.” She looked at me with disgust. “She was a weakli
ng, like you. She couldn’t handle the dark side of Voodoo any more than you can.”

  “Having compassion for life is not a weakness,” I contended. “Selfishness, on the other hand…”

  “Wait,” Marcus was waving his hands in the air and he brought them together to make the letter T. “Time out. Vivian, you killed her parents?”

  “And she tried to kill Eliza,” Jenny spoke up for the first time since the scuffle began.

  Shrinking away, Marcus looked wounded. The woman he thought he knew so well was turning out to be a monster.

  “I get it.” I wanted to keep Marcus’s mind off his own hurt until I could afford to comfort him, so I kept the conversation moving. “You wanted to kill me because to you, I was a modern-day Frankenstein. But why did you have to kill Marie and Lucas?”

  “To get them out of the way,” Samuel started to fill in the gap for me. “She couldn’t be a matriarch as long as they were together. Even if she’d only killed you, they would have birthed another child to come and take over.”

  Vivian clapped her hands. “Very good, Keeper.”

  I could feel my heart slowly breaking down. Was she really clapping as if Samuel just won a game of Murder Mystery? I was overcome with a burning needed to pause out of respect for my birth parents, but I had come here for the truth. I had to keep going.

  “What about my adoptive parents?” I swallowed hard to keep hysteria from taking over. “What the hell did they do to piss off the Royal Vivian Paris?”

  “You can thank your darling Samuel for that tragedy.” She smiled.

  I swung around in horror. “What?”

  “Oh, now,” Vivian said in a very motherly voice. “Don’t be too hard on him, dear. He tried very hard to keep it a secret. I had no idea you were still alive, but he slipped last Christmas when he came home to visit. Not to me, of course. But to Marcus.”

  The weight that came off my shoulders could have sent me crashing to the floor. I was furious with myself for even letting her make me think Samuel would hurt me. I couldn’t be mad at him for telling Marcus his healer was alive, and couldn’t be upset with Marcus for telling Vivian since he had no way of knowing she was this evil…thing.

  “You killed my parents to get to me again?”

  “They didn’t have to die, but they wouldn’t tell me where you were, so they weren’t any use to me. I tried again a few weeks ago.” She sighed as if trying to kill me was such an exhausting chore. “But Samuel couldn’t keep himself out of the way.”

  The reality of it all came tumbling down on me. All this was for power. This woman’s lustful greed for power cost the lives of four people I loved dearly, and here she stood talking about it as though it was nothing. And now that I was in Louisiana, what was to stop her from trying to kill me a fourth time?

  My vision crossed and blurred, and this time my eyes tingled as the irises shifted into blackness. With the weight of a hammer I clotheslined her, sending her falling back on to the same chair she had just been peacefully asleep in.

  No more peaceful nights for this creature. From this day forth her nightmares would be of me. Every time she had the urge to use her gift, she would think of me. The way she had made me suffer would pale in comparison.

  As I dug my fingers into her arms, her light begin to slither into them. She cried out in pain, but I wouldn’t let go until she was as weak and powerless as a mortal. The light above the stairway started to flicker, and all of a sudden it exploded, sending shards of glass flying across the room. Her power moved seamlessly into my fingers, sending vibrations shooting through my entire body. She was draining under my grasp, and the very last drop of energy that left her was the sweetest.

  “What…what have you done to me?” she asked, holding up her hands to examine them in horror.

  Leaning my face down close to hers I whispered, “You will never hurt another member of my family or my community again. This is my mother’s house, Vivian. That means now, it’s mine. Get out.”

  “But where will I go?” Her lip quivered in self-pity.

  I shrugged. “That’s not my problem. But if I were you, I would stay the hell out of New Orleans.”

  19

  “No peeking,” Samuel teased.

  “I hate surprises,” I lied. I really did love them.

  My shoulders fit perfectly into his palm, and he used them to cautiously direct me up the steps to the front door to the house I had claimed as my own only weeks before.

  After I banished Vivian and took back my parent’s dwelling, Samuel and Camille moved back in and Marcus stayed. There was an extra room now since Samuel and I took Vivian’s old room, so I invited Jenny to join us. Her parents were moving out of the state, and she had no desire to go with them.

  After all we had been through together they were truly the family I no longer had. The familiar creak of the door fueled my anticipation, along with lots of hushed whispers telling the other whisperers to be quiet. Samuel’s fingers made clumsy work of the knot he had tied just a little too well on the blindfold that kept me in the dark.

  “Are you ready?” he asked in the rare boyish, giddy tone.

  “Knowing this town?” I snickered. “Probably not even close.”

  The thin piece of cloth fell from my eyes, and my heart dropped to my feet. A small crowd was squeezed into my living room. Standing right in the center of them all was my tearful Aunt Patrice clutching a handkerchief, and my Uncle Charlie leaning on the mantel where a giant banner was spread across that said Welcome Home.

  I covered my mouth and choked back a sob. Aunt Patrice stretched her arms open wide and I ran to her, pulling Uncle Charlie in for a group hug.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Aunt Patrice just shook her head and fanned herself to stop from crying. She was too emotional to answer, so I looked to Charlie.

  “Your friend Samuel called us,” he explained. Damn, I had missed his accent.

  I twirled around to Samuel, who was standing only feet away. He never let me get much farther away than that these days. Even when I was in the bathroom, he waited right outside the door—a habit which was becoming more creepy than cute.

  “How did you…” I started.

  “I knew you had been thinking about them. I found their number in your phone while you were in the shower. I hope you’re not mad.”

  I shook my head and hugged him. “Of course I’m not mad.”

  “Lizzy…” Patrice looked as if she had seen a ghost. “You’re hugging him. And you just hugged us!”

  “There’s a lot to tell you,” I said. “Samuel, do you mind if I take them upstairs for a few minutes?”

  His hand tightened around my waist for a moment. I didn’t think he was going to let me go without him, but he released me.

  “I’ll be right down here if you need me,” he said.

  I showed my aunt and uncle to my room. Aunt Patrice and I sat on the end of the bed while Uncle Charlie sat in the chair by my vanity.

  “What did he mean, if you need me,” she asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing. He’s just a little overprotective.”

  She narrowed her eyes on me. “You mean he’s controlling? I don’t like controlling men.”

  “No, he isn’t controlling. He’s got his reasons for being concerned, Aunt Patrice, I promise.”

  “Well, now you have me concerned.” Uncle Charlie furrowed his brow.

  I hadn’t really noticed the similarities between my Uncle Charlie and Samuel, but now that I thought about it, it made me smile. They both had the macho thing going on, and they both loved me fiercely, even if they didn’t say it.

  “What’s going on, Eliza?” she demanded.

  “All right.” I took a deep, cleansing breath.

  I brought them up to speed with one long-winded story, and most of the time I was worried they thought I was making it up as I went. I knew how crazy it all sounded. I didn’t know if I would believe it if it was coming from one of them. But lu
ckily for me, they were far more open-minded than I was. Or at least, more than I had been in the past.

  “Why didn’t you report any of this?” Aunt Patricia pushed back a strand of hair from my eye and examined me more closely, searching my face to make sure I was really as OK as I claimed to be.

  “Really?” I laughed. “You want to know why I didn’t report that my magical aunt killed my magical parents?”

  Uncle Charlie chuckled, but Aunt Patrice didn’t find the humor in it.

  “You could’ve been killed,” she said.

  “But I wasn’t. Samuel wouldn’t let that happen.”

  As if it was right on cue, there was a light tap on the door and Samuel peered in.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you were OK.”

  I smiled weakly at him, and Uncle Charlie pulled the door from his hands, opening it the rest of the way. I was a little worried he was angry with Samuel for bringing me into all this, but when he noticed my protector, his face softened.

  “Thank you.” He held his hand out for Samuel to shake it. “She’s very special to us. Thank you for everything.”

  “She’s very special to me too,” Samuel said.

  “Patrice,” Charlie called. “Let’s let the lovebirds have a moment, shall we? I’m pretty sure they were making cocktails downstairs.”

  “There’s plenty of peach schnapps,” Samuel told her as she walked by. He must have heard me thinking it was her favorite.

  “Why were we up in the first place then?” She laughed, closing the door behind her.

  “So,” I said shyly, fidgeting with the hem of the pink sundress I was wearing.

  “So,” he echoed in his deep, sexy voice. He was peering not-so-discretely at my cleavage, and I fought the instinct to cover myself.

  He slowly made his way to the bed where I was still sitting and hovered over me, resting his hands on each side of my body. Tilting my head up, I leaned back to get a nice full view of his perfect face. He moved in closer to kiss me. I held his face in my hands to keep him back.