Head down, she picked at the afghan with shaking fingers. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters. I’m barely making it through the day.”
I leaned forward, my eyes pleading, “You don’t really believe the Balefires had anything to do with your mother’s disappearance, do you?”
Serena was quiet for a long moment. “No, I don’t. I wish I did, it would be so much easier than...this. Not knowing where she is or whether she’s all right. I know she wasn’t the greatest mother in the world, but...”
“She’s still family, and you love her. I understand completely.” And I really did. My mother was no prize, either, but I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her.
“I can’t even do anything about it.” Serena moved the afghan aside and indicated her swollen belly, and I had to choke back a gasp of shock. On anyone else, the baby wouldn’t have been showing quite yet, but Serena had always been stick thin, and stress had rendered her more gaunt than ever before.
“Serena, why don’t you come stay with us? We’ve got a packed house, but we can make room.” I blurted before I’d thought the invitation fully through. “Someone, in fact everyone there knows more about supernatural pregnancies than I do, and Terra makes a tonic I’m sure would perk you right up.”
She actually thought about it for a split second before declining. “I can’t. I’ve got to stay here and take care of my dad. Besides, if mother returns or they find out anything more about her, I should be here.”
“Okay, I get it. But can I at least bring you anything? That’s my niece or nephew in there, you know.”
“No, I can fend for myself. But I’ll keep it in mind.”
That was more than I expected and was shocked to realize it felt good to put our stupid feud to rest. Serena’s eyelids began to droop, so I whispered goodbye and headed back home. Terra would give me that tonic, and I’d talk Gran into taking it over. No one says no to Clara Balefire.
Chapter Twenty-One
MAGIC HAD NOTHING ON Elvis when it left the building, or to be more accurate, the world. It was the worst time of my life. About a minute after getting used to having more than the latent spark of magic all witches carry until the day they Awaken to their full potential, it all drained away like liquid through a siphon.
The Balefire, an unearthly blue for the past week, half-heartedly issued a handful of sparks and turned generic orange. I didn’t need to poke my hand into them to know the flames would sear my skin and even if I could, by some miracle, grab hold of the handle, there was no magic workshop on the other side of the hearth.
Knowing Salem might have been in there triggered the beginning of a freakout, but then he bolted into the room, stared at me with bugged-out eyes and his tail puffed up like a bottle brush, and I relaxed. I preferred him stuck in his cat form to squashed into the studs behind the fireplace when the workshop winked out.
If you really want to see what someone is made of, take a look at them when they are having their worst day. That’s when you see whether their spines are made of bone or jelly. If it took more than two minutes before the jelly-spined among the coven started lighting up the phone lines, I’d eat one of my favorite pairs of Jimmy Choos, sautéed with butter.
It took two seconds.
Clara picked up on the first ring and held the receiver away from her ear. Her face went a dull red, and I could hear the screeching from across the room.
“What did you do? Whatever it is, you fix it right now! Right now! Do you hear me? FIX IT!” The caller, who declined to reveal herself, disconnected and the phone rang again in Clara’s hand.
With Calypso missing and the coven now looking to my grandmother for de facto leadership, she was left shouldering the blame when things didn’t go exactly right. Maybe Mag did have the right idea remaining a solitary witch with fewer ties to the group. Less hassle all the way around.
“You might want to turn off the ringer and get ready for the physical onslaught. I predict the doorbell will start chiming any minute now,” I said ruefully. “Or we could run away. I know a place no one will ever find us. Well, if Evian’s magic still works.” Then again, an underwater grotto only accessible by magical means probably failed the safety test. “Maybe I’d better go check on the godmothers.”
I left Mag and Clara, heads together and speculating over what, if anything, there was to do about the situation while I hurried toward the faerie’s section of the house. Eerie silence met me at the threshold. Faerie silences, while not rare, usually signal they’ve hit battle stations—the last thing I needed right now.
“If you’re fighting again, you need to stop, we’ve got a situation on our hands.” My voice echoed through the space, so I pulled out my phone to check the calendar app where I tracked their events. Nothing on for today, so where had they gone? It wasn’t like Terra to skedaddle without leaving a note.
Added on to the back of the original house to form a reversed L shape, the faerie wing boasted three bedrooms, two baths, and a sitting room. Vaeta, since her arrival some months prior, had been sleeping on the couch as penance for having followed a demon to hell.
Between them, they could have magicked up a palace for her, but that was none of my business. Connected to the main house by the shared kitchen, which Terra had doubled in size during the building phase, the many-windowed faerie wing presented a modern contrast to the original structure.
“Terra? Soleil? Are you here?” No answer, only the shushed hum of a fly against a window screen. “Evian! Where are you?” The fly buzzed its lonely sound again. “Hmm. Must have had something they didn’t put on the books.” Frantic now, the fly pinged off the metal mesh.
A fly? Sometimes I’m just too dumb to live. Houseflies were not allowed in that section of the house. I refocused my attention on the long hallway with sliding glass doors at the end leading to a private patio. They were there—the three of them—tiny faces pressed against the screen, delicate wings beating the air.
Something seemed off. Way off.
In their winged form, the godmothers are every bit as perfect and beautiful as they are at full size. More actually. Imagine the petal softness splashed across a fragile butterfly’s wing mixed with the iridescent quality that creates sparkle and glows when a dragonfly flits through a patch of sunlight. Even if you have the biggest imagination in the world, you’ll still come up short.
Evian landed on my left shoulder and Soleil on my right—and yes, I did get a quick mental image of the angel and the devil in their place, but I wasn’t dumb enough to tell them about it. Terra plastered herself to my waist, tiny hands firmly clutching my clothes to stay anchored there. When I gently placed her in my palm, I felt the tremble of fear—something I’d never known from any of them before, and it brought a tear to my eye.
Soleil spoke first; a spate of words in Fae language that I could barely hear and sounded like a cat walking across the strings of an out-of-tune banjo.
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” Why is it when we try to talk to someone speaking another language, our voices rise, and our speech pattern slows down? It seemed like she understood me and I felt like an idiot standing in the middle of the hallway draped in faeries and trying to communicate.
“You know you all weigh more than you should for your size.”
Yep, they understood me all right. Dirty looks require no translation. I moved toward the seating area and transferred my passengers to the coffee table.
“Can you understand me?” Just making sure. Three heads nodded, so that was progress. “I assume the loss of magic forced you into this form.” Three more nods. “It’s the Balefire.” The duh expression also required no translation.
“What am I supposed to do about it? I know all that business about the flame feeding the witch and the witch feeding the flame, but it’s more complex than that. Maybe I should just leave. Gran was here first, and it’s her right to take back control. I should have listened to Kin and moved out weeks ago. All of this is my f
ault. I swear I’m the worst jinx in the world. Everything I touch turns to poo and—“ My tirade ended abruptly when Terra stamped her feet on the coffee table to get my attention and what followed was the most important game of Charades of my life. Every faerie game night had prepared me for this moment.
Terra pointed at me, shook her finger and fixed me with a stern expression, then pointed to the door. Her head moved deliberately from side to side.
“You don’t think I should leave.”
She gave me a terse nod and spent the next half a minute in conversation with her sisters. When they were finished, Evian took over. Pointing toward Soleil’s fiery head with one hand, she used the other to point toward the general area where the Balefire burned and followed that up by making a fluttering motion with her fingers.
“The Balefire,” I guessed, and she nodded so hard her wings dropped a sprinkling of faerie dust. Next, she pointed to her sisters and then to her head, and I didn’t have a clue what she meant.
“You hear the Balefire?”
A frustrated head shake met my guess, and she pointed to her temple again and lifted her eyes toward the ceiling. Ah, I got it. Think.
“You think?” A nod and a smile told me I was on the right track and she repeated the Balefire gesture.
“You think the Balefire...”
Evian exaggeratedly clutched at her throat, stuck out her tongue, and then tipped her head sideways and let her eyes drop closed.
“Sick. You think it’s sick. I already knew that.” Another frustrated shake of the head and she mimed drinking something and then the same throat clutch, tongue out, faked death scene.
“Poisoned? You think the Balefire has been poisoned?” Terra held her palm out and tipped it back and forth in the gesture that means sort of, but not quite.
“Not poisoned.” I let my brain follow the concept to another conclusion. “You think someone tampered with the Balefire. Did something to it that isn’t exactly poison, but has the same effect.”
Not only did they exchange high fives, but they also did the faerie version of the chest bump jump thing while I contemplated the theory. Tampered with. Why didn’t I think of that?
Besides, what kind of poison would work on fire? I knew for a fact that the Balefire sneered at water. You don’t live with the equivalent of a water nymph on steroids without a few mishaps.
Witch feeds the flame.
“You’re sure it’s not because there are two of us feeding the fire?”
Three emphatic head shakes.
“Will you be okay like this?” Raised eyebrows confirmed the stupidity of my question, and I shrugged. “Had to ask. I’ll go poke around in the fireplace, but I'm not going to promise I’ll find anything.”
I left them there with a backward look and detoured into the garage where I hoped to find the set of fireplace tools we’d used before my Awakening. There hadn’t seemed to be any reason to let them gather dust in the house when I could use my hands.
Ever since losing my beloved pink scooter to an accident, the garage felt like the empty space left behind after having a tooth removed. You know you should leave it alone, but you can’t help poking your tongue in there until it hurts.
Ten minutes later, I emerged victorious, if slightly disheveled. A smear of greasy dust decorated one cheek, my hair looked like a spider’s house, and it occurred to me that Terra neglected the garage in her tidying efforts. I brushed myself off and headed for the parlor with a poker in one hand and a small shovel in the other. Lexi Balefire, superhero. Not.
My prediction about how soon to expect the onslaught of powerless witches must have been off by a bit since it was still quiet inside the house. Other than the sound of the phone ringing off the hook and Gran placating coven members, that is.
Bypassing that mess, I headed straight for the fireplace. The next few minutes I spent moving partially-burned logs around with the poker and pretending I had some idea what to look for. Nothing jumped out at me as being off. It looked like a normal fireplace with normal logs burning in a normal way. Except the very normalcy of it all was what was off. Any resemblance to the magical fire I’d tended all those years was gone.
Salem dashed into the room and, plaintively yowling, twined his body around my legs like he was trying to tell me something. I don’t speak cat. Maybe I’m supposed to, and had just ignored that part of my training as I’d ignored so many other things he wanted me to learn. Finally, I picked him up and held him out so I could gaze into one green and one blue eye.
“Talk to me.” Since there was nothing else to do, I could at least listen. Salem yowled again, and I remembered him teaching me to meditate. What was it he’d said? Meditation allows the universe to flow through your conscious being and if you do it right, you can become one with the flow.
Still carrying him, I sank to the floor and tucked my legs into a crossed position. Anything was worth a try, so I concentrated on each breath. In and out, letting everything else float away until there was nothing left but the breath and Salem’s bi-colored gaze.
“Stop looking for what is and try to find what isn’t,” Salem said in his man voice.
I popped out of the meditative state like a cork coming out of a bottle. What the spell did he mean by that? Look for what isn’t.
“Not even a little helpful, Salem.”
In answer, he snarled and took a swipe at me with one paw.
“Fine, I’ll try.” Setting the cat gently on the floor, I turned back to the fireplace and let my gaze rove over the flames again. Smoke curled up the chimney as the hot orange tongues devoured logs, bark and all. Nothing looked out of place to me. Nothing at all.
Look for what isn’t. I let my eyes go slightly unfocused and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw the anomaly. An actual hole in the source of the flames.
“Gran! Aunt Mag!” I called out. “You need to come in here, I think I’ve found something important.”
It took a minute or two, some unladylike language, and finally, a rude hang-up before the two elder witches joined me in front of the Balefire. Mag caught my eye on the way in and held up the battery she’d removed from the back of the cordless receiver. There would be no more phone calls for a while.
“Look.” I pointed to the negative space where the fire should be. “Do you see that? It looks like someone removed a piece of the flame and left it blank.”
Silence grew while two sharp pairs of eyes scanned the flickering pattern and I wondered if I’d just made a giant fool out of myself.
“I’m sorry, It’s probably nothing.”
“Oh, it’s something all right. I don’t know how we missed it before. This fire has been meddled with.” Gran agreed with me.
“But who? And when?”
“This place has been busier than a bee in a field of flowers lately.” Mag started to list the possible culprits. “I think we can rule out everyone who currently lives here since we all have ready access and wouldn’t need to steal fire for any reason.”
“There’s the coven, and I hate to mention it, but Kin could have...”
“Kin would never do that.” Hot anger flushed my face, and I interrupted my grandmother rudely.
Leave it to Mag to play the bad cop. “Now, Lexi, you have to admit he’s had access.”
“It wasn’t Kin, so keep going with the list.” My teeth ground together painfully when I clenched my jaw in anger as I rose to stalk out of the room. Back in the kitchen, I pulled a sheet from the magnetic grocery pad mounted on the door of the refrigerator and slashed out the names of the coven in bold strokes. My grandmother followed me but waited until I had filled one side of the sheet and flipped it over to continue the list before quietly suggesting more names. If I was hoping for an apology, it was clear none would be made.
Fine, but I had no plans to forgive the assumption, either, and I’ll confess right now that I might have acted a little childish about the whole thing.
Okay, maybe more than a little.
Unfortunately, my snit was interrupted by the doorbell, and I never got to finish it properly because half of witchdom was standing on the porch. None were carrying pitchforks, but the mob mentality showed in the way they moved.
Clara nipped the rebellion in the bud with a few well-chosen words, and even though I wasn’t her biggest fan at the moment, I couldn’t help but admire the way she took charge. No wonder she’d become a high priestess. As usual, Mag practically faded into the wallpaper the minute the hallway started to fill, but I could see her appraising each witch passing by and I don’t think she missed a twitch of the eye or a quirk of the lips. The woman could read body language better than I could read books.
When I could, I caught her eye and raised an eyebrow to question whether she’d picked up any nuance that would lead to the culprit. A barely perceptible shake of her head had me mentally crossing names off the list.
Surprisingly, Serena Snodgrass was among the first wave, and I didn’t need Mag’s eagle eye to see she was looking stronger. Either Gran had done as I asked or she’d had news of her mom. It couldn’t have been anything to do with our previous conversation, and I wasn’t going to say this to her, but I was happy to see the change.
Before I could approach the pair, the mob hit the refresh button on their diatribe.
“...been dealing with this for years while that granddaughter of yours...”
“...time for someone else to take over as Keeper...”
“...hoarding all the power for yourselves...”
“...dead children and our high priestess is missing...”
Fear-powered voices chattered and buzzed around me to fling accusations at my family for being the source of all the rotten things that had happened lately. Gran opened her mouth several times to interject until finally the ruckus culminated into one pointed question.
“What exactly are you planning to do about it?”
“Oh, for the love of the Goddess, put on your big-girl witch hats and stop acting like a bunch of sissies.” Mag’s voice cut through the din like a machete through a mushroom, and a shocked silence fell over the room.
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