NightWind 1st Book: HellWind Trilogy

by Charlotte Boyett-Compo

  “It’s no bother,” Maxine assured her and turned left as the light changed. “Maybe some soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. How does that sound?”

  Hot, Lauren thought with a grimace. A cool salad and lemonade sounded a whole lot better to her, but she didn’t say so. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the headrest.

  “Feeling poorly again?”

  “Just tired.”

  “We’ll be there in a minute or two.” Maxine reached out and patted her daughter’s knee. “You’ll feel better with something in your stomach.” She laughed uneasily, casting an embarrassed look at Lauren’s midsection. “Other than that little bundle of mischief you got growing in there.”

  Lauren lifted her head, turned, and stared at her mother. It was the first time any mention had been made of the baby. For all Lauren knew, her mother was as upset about the baby as she was about Lauren getting married.

  “You know,” Maxine said, unaware of the look her daughter was giving her, “I’m the only woman my age at the courthouse who doesn’t have a grandkid or two.” She smiled to herself. “Lord, I hope it’s a boy.”

  Astounded by the remark; flabbergasted by the sex her mother was wishing the child to be, Lauren could not find the words to say. She simply stared, confusion running across her face in tighter and tighter waves until the confusion had transformed itself to anger. When her mother turned and grinned at her, she wanted to wipe what she thought was a smirk off the older woman’s smug face.

  “Have you picked out a name yet?” Maxine asked. She looked down once more at the rounding of Lauren’s belly.

  Lauren bit her tongue to keep from berating her mother. “Connor James if it’s a boy and Helen Louise if it’s a girl.”

  “Hope it ain’t twins!” Maxine chuckled. “Now that would be a real handful!”

  Shaking her head at her mother’s cheerful banter, the pretenses of a normal mother-daughter relationship that had never existed, Lauren turned away and watched the scrub oaks and scraggly pines they passed. She tuned out her mother’s banal chattering and wished she had not allowed herself to be driven home by her mother.

  “You know Syntian really should do something about this driveway,” Maxine groused as she pulled onto the pinestraw covered lane that led up to the old house. “The least he could do is put down some gravel.”

  With her jaw clenched as tightly as teeth and bone would allow, Lauren forced herself not to scream at the insane words. “I’m sure that will be at the top of his list when he comes home, Mother,” she mumbled.

  Maxine glanced her way and then pursed her lips. “Don’t get huffy with me, Anna Lauren. I was only making a comment.”

  “An entirely inappropriate comment considering the circumstances, don’t you think, Mama?” Lauren snapped as the car rolled to a stop at the wide veranda.

  “Now, you listen here, missy...”

  But Lauren had already opened the door and was climbing out of the car. “I appreciate the ride home, Mama. Thank you. But I think I’m going to go up and go to bed for a while. The heat is wearing me out and I just want to sleep.” She slammed the door and walked to the steps and started to climb, furious when she heard her mother’s door open.

  “I’m not about to leave you here alone.”

  “Mother,” Lauren stated, turning around to stare with annoyance at the other woman. “I am a grown woman.”

  “I need to talk to you, Lauren,” Maxine interrupted, forestalling any further excuses.

  The two women glared at one another for a moment and then Lauren gave in, thinking if she got it over with, whatever inane thing her mother wanted to discuss, maybe the woman would leave sooner. “All right. Come on in,” she said ungraciously.

  Maxine clamped her mouth shut and climbed up on the porch behind her daughter. In her hand was clutched the big canvas carryall that went with her to work every day. Lauren eyed it suspiciously, hoping that it didn’t contain extra underwear and a nightgown. “I’m not staying,” Maxine defended. “Not all night, anyway.”

  Sighing wearily, Lauren unlocked the door and ushered her mother on past the living area and into the kitchen where she poured the both of them an iced tea and then sat down at the little round table in of the bay window.

  “All right, Mama. What’s so important that it can’t wait?”

  Maxine laid the big carryall on the table and seated herself. She took a long drink of the tea before rummaging in the bag and drawing out what looked to be a very old scrapbook. “I want you to look at this,” she told Lauren and pushed the book toward her.

  “What is it?” Lauren glanced down at the musty covering that bore no lettering and wrinkled her nose. “Where did you get it?”

  “Just open it to the first page,” Maxine ordered.

  For a reason she couldn’t explain, opening the old book was the last thing Lauren wanted to do, but seeing the resolve in her mother’s sharp eyes, she drew in a deep breath and then turned back the ash gray cover of the book. The first page looked so ancient she was afraid to touch it for fear it would crumble. She peered at the elaborate scrawl of elegant lettering on the page then looked up at her mother.

  “What does it say?”

  Maxine shook her head. “Read it.”

  Looking closer at the antique writing, Lauren was finally able to decipher the calligraphy. Her right brow arched and she looked up at her mother. “The Book of Shadows?”

  “Yes,” Maxine answered. She pointed. “Go ahead. Turn the page.”

  Carefully picking up the bottom corner of the page, Lauren flipped it over and was astounded to see a list of women’s names covering the next page. She could barely read the first dozen or so, but near the bottom, three names stood out as though written in neon. She stared, then slowly lifted her head to look at her mother.

  “Anna Ruth Fontrelle? Wasn’t that your great-great grandmother?” she asked. At her mother’s nod, she put her finger on the second name. “Felicity Beckman.” Her brows drew together. “That was your great grandmother.” She remembered the names from the genealogical research on her family she’d done while in college.

  Maxine tapped the last name on that page. “Miranda Hennessey,” she said softly. “My grandmother.”

  Lauren felt a chill run down her spine. “What is this book, Mama?”

  “Turn the page and look on the back.”

  Something told her she shouldn’t, that she should shut the book, and tell her mother to leave, but a part of her, that curious part that was woman, gave her the strength to turn the page.

  She let out a long breath. Her mother’s name was the only one scribbled on the page. She looked up. “Why isn’t Grandmama’s name in here?”

  Maxine shrugged. “She never needed what the book had to offer. Besides, she was so pious, she shoulda been a damned nun!”

  Lauren started to close the dusty-smelling book, but her mother stopped her.

  “Turn the page,” Maxine commanded.

  As each successive page was turned, Lauren became more and more confused. There were drawings, odd symbols, numerical calculations, words that held no meaning for her, poems whose words she could barely make out and that made no sense. There were lists and what could only have been called recipes mixed in with astrological symbols and dates and times, phases of the moon, properties of plants and herbs and spices.

  “I don’t understand most of this,” Lauren admitted.

  “That’s because some of it is written in Hebrew, some in Ancient Assyrian, Gaelic, French. There are spells from Egypt and runes from Scotland and translations of some writings off cave walls when man had yet to walk upright.”

  “My Lord,” Lauren finally exclaimed, realizing at last what the book was. “This is a book of witchcraft!”

  “Demonology,” Maxine corrected. “There is a difference.”

  She turned another page, not having heard her mother, and stared at the heading. Her blood ran cold in her veins as she read the words: The Summonin
g of Demons. Without knowing she was doing so, she began reading the incantation to raise an incubus from the Abyss. “The NightWind?” she whispered.

  “That’s not important, now,” Maxine said, startling Lauren and making the girl look up at her as though she had just awakened from a nightmare. “You can read that any time. Turn the page. See what’s after the invocation to the NightWind.”

  Not wanting to, but knowing she had no choice, Lauren flipped the page and gasped, looking up to gape at her mother. “Is this blood?” she asked of the writing scratched down the length of the page. The dirty orange coloring could be nothing else.

  “Look at the top of the page,” Maxine asked, deflecting her daughter’s shock from the ink that had been used to write the document. “There where it says on this date, etceteras, etceteras, I, Sybelle Ahunnami, do enter into this agreement.”

  Lauren lowered her shocked eyes to the old parchment page. She would never have been able to tell that those were the words in the document had her mother not given her the key to read them. She looked up, more puzzled than ever.

  “Who was she, Mama?”

  “An Assyrian princess as best I can tell,” her mother replied. Maxine reached out and began flipping pages. Page after page after page bore the identically same phrasing, only the names and dates had been altered, along with the handwriting in which the document had been produced. “Generations, Lauren,” Maxine explained. “Generations of women, our ancestors, yours and mine, all women from our family, have kept this book. It has been handed down from mother to daughter, from grandmother to granddaughter since time began. Pages have been added with every successive generation as have spells and all manner of magic that has been proven successful for our womenfolk.” She stopped at a page that bore the name of Maxine Mulroney. The document was dated 7 April, 1834. “I was named after her. She was my great, great, great grandmother.” She turned another page. “This is my grandmother. It was from her I gained the knowledge of this book.”

  Lauren snatched her hands away from the vile thing and shuddered. “Get that thing out of my house!” she snapped, hugging her arms about her. “Now! This minute!”

  “These are pacts with the NightWind, Lauren,” Maxine said, flipping back halfway through the book. “Here at the bottom of the page. It’s his mark.’’

  Involuntarily, Lauren glanced down at the crooked symbol. It looked to her like an X turned slightly on its side with the upper right leg longer and curved outward.

  “That’s the ancient symbol of the Wind,” Maxine breathed. “That’s not what most people think of as the astrological sign, but it is the true mark.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”

  “Each of us,” Maxine said, her eyes glazing as she spoke, “signed our pact with him.” She turned her dreamy look to her child. “We have each made our bargain with the NightWind. And in return, he granted us his protection.”

  “I want you to leave, Mama,” Lauren ordered, getting up from the table. “I don’t want that vile thing in my house.”

  “I was thirteen when I signed my pact with him,” Maxine told her. “He came to me on the whisper of a breeze and gave me all that I asked of him.”

  “Mama,” Lauren said loudly. “I want you to leave!”

  Maxine turned the pages back over until she had found the document signed by her great-great grandmother. “Look,” she said, pointing down at the page. “Look how the symbol has changed since that very first bargain.”

  Lauren reached down to shut the book, to lift it and throw it into her mother’s face if necessary to get the woman to leave, but her gaze feel on the dark rust mark at the bottom of the page and she stopped.

  “This was the last time he put just the symbol on the agreement. My great grandmother insisted he take a human name because up until then, the women of our family had only summoned him as the NightWind.” She touched the symbol on the page. “What does it look like, Lauren?”

  It looked like a lightning bolt with a straight line drawn through it, Lauren thought. She had no chance to say that for her mother was already turning the page and even before the parchment sheet settled, Lauren knew what would be at the foot of the page.

  “My great grandmother gave him the name he used from that day forward when he made bargains with our family.” Maxine studied her daughter’s white face, searching the eyes that had glazed. “She said he had been born and bred of the greatest of transgressions, that he had been brought forth from that very first day to do the wickedness our ancestors could not do on their own.” Maxine noticed the tremor that had started in Lauren’s hands. “So she named him after that greatest of transgressions. She named him Sin.”

  Scrawled in the unmistakable, bold stroke that she had seen many times, Lauren stared at the name penned in blood across the document before her and wanted to scream with the horror of it. She reached out, mindless of tearing the aging paper and turned the page. Again, that familiar signature glared up at her from the yellow-tinted page that held her great grandmother’s name. Once more she turned the page and there, at the opposite end of the page from her own mother’s delicate, convent school penmanship, Lauren read her husband’s name: Syntian Cree.

  “He changed the spelling of sin and altered the name himself,” Maxine said softly. “Cree is his real name. The name his mother gave him many thousands of years ago.”

  Slowly Lauren sat down, her gaze riveted on the book, on that one name. Her mother was speaking, saying something to her, but she didn’t hear. Her blood was pounding in her temples, blotting out all other sounds, and she was trembling so hard her teeth were clicking together.

  “There’s more,” Maxine said loudly, gaining her daughter’s attention. She bent over and turned several pages at once then straightened up to allow her daughter to see what was on the page. “Seeing this, I don’t see how you can doubt what I have told you.”

  On the page, drawn in an expert hand, was Syntian. He was staring at her as he had been seen by the eyes of Nicolette Du Mer on the fourteenth of May in the year 1568.

  “I guess somewhere along about the turn of this century, the women of our family stopped drawing him and started taking pictures,” Maxine said gently. She flipped through different poses of the same man, drawn in different centuries, clothed in the fashions of the times, his likeness caught forever by many different women, until she came to a section near the back where first yellowing lithographs, then grainy black and white photographs of Syntian Cree had been taped to the newer pages.

  There he was in 1871, standing beside a lovely little woman with pale, pale hair. He looked stiff and formal in his cutaway and he held his top hat in the crook of his arm like it was an afterthought, and probably had been.

  In 1913, he was seated in front of a woman with long dark hair. Her hand was protectively caressing his shoulder and he was glaring at the camera as though it were his enemy.

  1930, the year Maxine had been born, found him lying on the grass at the feet of Lauren’s great-grandmother. His white shirt was open to the waist and there was a high sheen on his knee-high boots.

  And in 1949, her mother’s freshman year in college, Lauren saw him holding the hand of a pretty young woman in a prom dress. The pretty young woman could be none other than her mother.

  “That was the year Angeline took him away from me,” Maxine said, walking away from the photograph. “I had broken the pact between us and she had offered him a way to avoid going back to the Abyss.”

  Lauren stared at the smiling face in the photo. How handsome you look, Syntian, she thought as her gaze went lovingly over him. The tuxedo was without doubt very expensive and the corsage on her mother’s wrist was almost certainly made up of orchids.

  “He really had no choice,” her mother was saying. “I see that now, but at the time, I was furious with him.” She snorted. “And beyond furious with that whoring Angeline!”

  Lauren flipped through the pages, looking at the drawings, renderin
gs done with loving hands and eyes that had no doubt looked upon him with the same measure of love she, herself, had bestowed upon Syntian Cree.

  “Given the choice of signing a pact with her or being forced back into the darkness and stench of the Pit, I would have chosen the pact, myself,” Maxine mumbled as she paced about the kitchen.

  Lauren traced the charcoal jaw line in a drawing made on the Twentieth of June in 1777. Of all the drawings she had seen, this one seemed to capture the true essence of the man.

  “Right after he left with Angeline, I married your father. The biggest mistake of my life, but after Syntian, what man would have lived up to a woman’s dreams?”

  The girl who had drawn that portrait in 1777 was named Gezelle Gilbert. Lauren wondered what great, great appellation fitted that name. That she had been an expert with her art was in the shading of Syntian’s eyes and the mobility of his mouth, the almost life-like angle of his chin. Gezelle had caught the essence of his sexuality in that drawing.

  “When he showed up here, I knew exactly what had happened.” Lauren’s mother sat down at the table again. “I knew you had called him and he had come to you.”

  Lauren looked up, caught by the words. “What?”

  “He has been indentured to our family for thousands of years, Lauren. He belongs to us. He owes allegiance to us for it was our ancestor, that very first sorceress who freed him from his imprisonment in the Abyss and brought him out into the light once more.” She reached out and took her daughter’s hand. “He heard you calling him, Lauren. He was drawn to you because there is still a connection despite the fact I broke the pact between him and our family. Out of all the voices in the universe, all the heartbroken, lonely, desperate women, it was to you he came. Don’t you see?”

  “No,” Lauren shaking her head. “I don’t see at all.”

  “You had to have called him, Lauren,” Maxine stressed. “Yes, you had to have! He couldn’t have just come on his own.” She tightened her hold on Lauren’s hand. “Think, girl. Think! Was there a time when your life was so miserable, so lonely, that you wished for some gallant knight in shining armor to come to rescue you? Did you not have some fantasy of being swept away from the drudgery of your life to some distant place where everything would be the way you wanted it to be? Didn’t you cry out for help? For a ceasing of all the misery in your life?”