Wolves at the Door

by Lidiya Foxglove

  “Where are the diaries now?” I asked. “I want my friends to read them and make their own judgments.”

  “Not here,” Gaston said in a low, threatening voice.

  “You have the diaries? What did you do, steal them? My friends deserve to know what they said.”

  “I’ll tell them what they said.”

  “I’m sure you will tell them what you think they said.”

  “I will indeed; I am a very honorable man who doesn’t deceive my friends. ” Gaston walked through me before I had time to solidify and put himself in the doorway of the outdoor kitchen. Billie had the door open to let in some fresh air. She was humming as she painted. The kitchen had exposed beams of dark wood and she was painting them white and brightening up the room.

  “Mademoiselle Billie.” Gaston leaned in the door, doffing his hat.

  “What’s up?” She looked at him like she thought he was a weirdo.

  “I have something to talk to you and your friends about and it’s very important.”

  “Right now? I’m kinda real busy. Weren’t you pruning?”

  “I was going to wait but I’m starting to worry that the incubus might find some way to silence me.”

  “I’m not going to silence you, but I am definitely going to challenge you. Billie, I wouldn’t listen to him. I think he has Deveraux’s diaries. I want you all to read them so you understand the situation.”

  “Diaries?” She hopped down from her short ladder. “You didn’t just come to do yard work after all, did you? I really hate wasting daylight in a building that doesn’t have electricity so this better be good.”

  “It’s important,” Gaston said. “I can finish this for you later.”

  “Oh, fine, guess I might as well. I don’t know what the others are up to, but I’ll give you a lunch break worth of my time.”

  Billie didn’t trust Gaston anyway, and there was no reason Helena should trust him either, so maybe this would work out all right.

  The only problem was that my tongue was tied when it came to telling the truth…and the events of 1975 were pretty damning.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Helena

  Gaston worked pretty cheap, so I guess I should have known there was a catch. He was only here to scope us out and now he wanted to sabotage Byron. We all sat down with our sandwiches and looked at him skeptically. I was relieved to see that the others didn’t seem to trust him either, since they didn’t know Byron like I did.

  Old vampires really were hard to trust. A young vampire, that was one thing. These days, the magical community had good networks of communication and ways of getting blood safely to vampires like it was a normal part of the food supply chain.

  But a three hundred year old vampire? This guy had killed people. It was just a fact. I didn’t know if he was actually from France or had started out right here in the settlement of Louisiana, but he had surely taken advantage of all the travelers and rogues traveling on the Mississippi River. There was probably a time in his life when he killed people without thinking much about it.

  That sort of thing sucked away your humanity, leaving you with plenty of a vampire’s innate power to entice and enchant, but no real soul.

  “You look at me like I’m a villain. I’m trying to help you,” Gaston said.

  “Before we get started, I want a truth spell,” I said.

  “Fine by me,” he said, waving both of his hands toward himself. “Bring it on. I only intend to tell the truth.”

  Damn. I was hoping he’d fight me a little.

  “So what’s your deal and why should we trust you?” Jake asked.

  “Jake, give me a second to cast the spell already.” I didn’t just cast a quickie, I got on my hands and knees and drew a circle around Gaston’s chair, binding him to the truth as long as he was within it. Billie polished off her whole sandwich before I was done.

  “Okay, I’m done. You have five minutes. Go,” Billie said.

  “You people are so impatient considering I’m about to tell you something so important. You trust this demonic ghost without knowing the first thing about his motives. Why? Who is he fucking? All of you?”

  Jake spit out his coffee when Gaston’s eyes swept over him. “No! I trust him because Hel does.”

  Billie looked at me. “I don’t really know the ghost but Mr. Greenwood did tell me about him. I knew they were friends.”

  “Umm…well…I do trust Byron,” I said, feeling extremely on the spot. How could I explain why I trusted him without admitting that I was, indeed, fucking him…or getting fucked by him, as it usually worked out. But I did trust my own intuition. “You see, I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by bitches so I think I read people pretty well. I don’t trust easily. Byron can’t tell me much, but I believe what he does tell me because he never sets off my asshole radar.”

  Billie snorted. “I believe that.”

  Gaston put his hands on the table. “Do you know who killed Byron and kept him from speaking?”

  “No…”

  “It was his so-called friends. Fiore, Deveraux, and Sam made a plan to kill their dangerous demon friend before he could unleash his reign of chaos on the world. They executed this plan on a trip to Fiore’s house, since he was the most isolated and no one would hear Byron scream.”

  What!?

  Okay. Did not expect that.

  We all looked at Byron. He was not an easy man to piss off, but I could tell Gaston was doing it. “They were my friends,” he said. “My best and dearest friends. I’ve watched them age and die, but I kept them company through it all. Sam doesn’t even remember who I am anymore.”

  “Byron…is that true? I mean…the part where they killed you?”

  “It must be,” he said, with the slightest shrug toward my spell circle. “He has to tell the truth.”

  “Okay. Um. But then…they wanted someone to find Pandora’s Box later?”

  “Yes,” Byron said. “As the years went by, and Etherium grew more corrupt, their minds changed.”

  “Did they?” Gaston said. “Or did forty-five years of hauntings by a seductive ghost and their own advanced age begin to simply wear them down? The truth is, they went to all this trouble to kill their own friend, hide the maps and books that would have allowed them to open Pandora’s Box, and they failed to train anyone to carry their mission forward, so what, I wonder, is the evidence that they were not trying desperately to keep the box closed? How do you know that this man you consider a friend is not, in fact, using you as well?”

  “Well, how do I know you aren’t using us?” I asked, as I saw Jake and Jasper leaning toward each other and murmuring.

  “You know what you’re doing is dangerous,” Gaston said. “I am trying to stop you.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Billie said. “You’re a vampire! Why wouldn’t you want to end the Ethereal council?”

  “I have no love for the council,” Gaston said. “But what you’re planning is going to cause complete chaos. It will end balances of power that have existed for hundreds of years. And as an old man who has seen a lot, I would advise against it.”

  “So America might as well be owned by the British, huh?” Billie said. “And we should never have had a Civil Rights movement. Or anything that caused chaos for a while.”

  “If the four of you really, really want to have that sort of damage on your own heads, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I think you’re a big coward is what I think!” Billie said.

  “I think you are a loud-mouthed ninny,” Gaston retorted.

  Billie stopped and doubled over laughing. “Well, maybe you’re right about that but I’m going to keep going anyway.”

  Byron maintained a monk-like calm throughout this conversation. He couldn’t defend himself, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  My stomach was twisting into knots. What if Gaston is right? I just want to mind my own business, really. I never asked to bring chaos.

  “Do
you know what Pandora’s Box actually will do?” Jasper asked.

  “Deveraux said it would destroy Etherium as he knew it,” Gaston said.

  “You don’t really know either,” Jake said. “That’s all we keep hearing. Some vague idea that it will destroy the magical world but what actually happens? Does Etherium explode?”

  “Deveraux never told you that?” I pressed.

  “No.”

  “In the end, he didn’t trust a vampire with his darkest secrets. I’m shocked,” Byron said, giving Gaston a look that actually made the attractive tri-centenarian (my mother used to tell me never to forget how old a vampire actually was) squirm a little like we’d tied him to his chair. “He never told you any of this, did he? You rummaged through the house after he died and stole his diary and read it. And the diary didn’t say what Pandora’s Box was.”

  “Just because I’m a bit of a thief doesn’t mean I wasn’t also his friend, and that I am not concerned when I see a small group of naive young people in the sway of a demon,” Gaston grumbled. “I can tell none of you trust me and couldn’t possibly believe me when I say I’m just a concerned citizen who has seen too many people lose their lives for a bad idea.”

  Good lord. What to think? Byron’s friends murdered him. Who does that? They must have thought he was dangerous and now I had to trust Byron that they changed their minds. But was it a little convenient that they were all dying and dead?

  Sometimes I saw a determined look in Byron’s eyes that freaked me out just a little.

  Jake stood up from the table abruptly. “Hel, where are the Arcana? Bring them here to the table.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to figure this out right here, right now. We’re not leaving this table until we figure out what Pandora’s Box does. We’ll all look through the books together and brainstorm.”

  “But I haven’t translated them yet.”

  “You’re never going to have time to translate them. Enough excuses. Either we figure it out or we walk away right now. I’m not going to get myself killed and make our parents cry for no reason. But if there’s really something to it, something worth dying for if it came right down to it, we should be able to figure it out by studying the pictures.”

  “But…”

  “Those books come from a time when most people were illiterate,” he said. “The pictures will tell us something.”

  I was surprised to see Jake leading the charge. Usually he seemed to be more interested in flirting with me and working on the house than all the rest, but right now I glimpsed some deeper passion in him, deeper than I had ever seen before. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I could see that he had some deeper reason for working so hard. He had a fire inside him that always burned, and it was why the Sullivan Brothers were the most successful flippers in the northeast.

  I wondered if I was the only person here who just wanted to ditch my past without a plan for my future.

  “I’ll get them.” I pounded up the stairs. I’d been sleeping in the smallest bedroom, and I kept our treasures locked in a cabinet built in to the wall.

  Now I brought them downstairs and each of us grabbed a book. I looked through Arcana Wyrd while Billie searched Arcana Etherium and the Sullivans both looked over Arcana Sinistral.

  Trap a bunch of contractors and decorators in a room with a pile of books and you get a lot of twitching. I knew we were all dying to get back to work as we turned heavy pages and tried to puzzle meaning out of the tiny scenes that had been painted by wizards so long ago that I hardly knew what their lives might have been like. My nerd brother would have been into it, but although I was capable of studying when forced, I didn’t love it. The paintings all seemed to be of battles between demons and warlocks, or ethereals or demons, or just random Medieval scenes with like, a priest, or a weird looking dog.

  All I could see was the being with one demon wing and one angel wing, and one demon horn, with his lips sewn shut.

  They sewed my lips shut, Byron told me when we first met.

  This being seemed to be the protector of Pandora’s Box. In Arcana Etherium, he was killed by a group of men in warlock’s robes. They looked about as happy as Medieval paintings could look, too.

  “I wonder if this is the same creature,” Jake said.

  “‘Creature’?” Byron said. “I would call that a man, not a creature.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re protective of him, huh?”

  “I am,” he said.

  “The man, then.” Jake was pointing out a painting in Arcana Sinistral. In this painting, a beautiful angel was weeping over the corpse of a man with his lips sewn shut, but now he didn’t have wings. His skin was gray and he was wearing just a loincloth. The depiction of his death in Arcana Sinistral was considerably more sympathetic than the triumphant murder portrayed in Arcana Etherium.

  “We know demons can make their wings disappear, or maybe the artist just didn’t feel like drawing them.”

  “Byron, this is you,” I said. “I know this is you.”

  He couldn’t reply, could barely even signal at the truth, but I could just tell that these ancient paintings meant something to him.

  “You were the protector of Pandora’s Box in the eleventh century before the warlocks destroyed it. Right? I really think that’s it.”

  “He’s a thousand years old?” Jake looked at him like he was completely weirded out and skeptical.

  “Oh wow, you’re so beat,” Billie told Gaston.

  “It’s not a contest,” Gaston said, arms crossed. He had not been helping with this, but just watched us the way I sometimes got sucked into DIY shows after a long day of work. (When I had a TV handy, which wasn’t often.)

  “If you were protecting the box…” I put my chin in my hand, staring down both pictures.

  “What fabric is as old as time, as fragile as glass, and that shall brush the face of rich man and poor man, man and woman?” Byron asked me.

  The troll’s riddle. My eyes widened. “You were trying to tell me in the dream,” I said. “Your mind conjured the troll! If it’s not the fabric of time…it’s…the fabric of the world.”

  A smile flicked across his face. “The fabric…between worlds.”

  Now I understood.

  We all understood.

  I still had questions. Lots of them. But I was shaking with excitement, with sudden clarity. The maps. The trade language.

  It was all clicking together.

  “We thought the magical realms had always been separate,” I said. “But a thousand years ago, the magical realms were not closed to each other at all, were they?”

  “Etherium must have put up some sort of wall around their world,” Jake said. “So they could keep us out.”

  “All these pictures of battles probably explain what led to it,” Jasper said. “All the weird dogs are supposed to be us, I’ll bet.”

  “We’re so much more handsome than that,” Jake said.

  The man—or “creature”, or deity, or god—who had held the maps must have been very powerful. He must have had the ability to let the realms be free—or the power to separate them. And so, the Ethereal warlocks took them from him. They killed him. And they made sure that even his ghost would never speak.

  My ghost.

  Chapter Twenty

  Helena

  “So, if we put the maps together, it will join the worlds?” Jasper said. “Sort of like, the maps are the worlds and if their paths meet, people can travel between them? Something like that?”

  “I thought it was supposed to destroy Etherium,” Jake said.

  “Well, if Sinistrals could come into Etherium whenever, that would destroy Etherium as we know it,” Billie said. “Which is what Deveraux told me.”

  “And Wyrd, too,” I said. “The faeries would no longer be isolated. It could get…complicated.”

  “Chaos,” Gaston said. “As I said.”

  “Who cares if we did cause chaos? Right
now, Etherium is the magical world’s country club,” Jake said. “They’re the ones who decided to ban visitors who aren’t approved. Sure, it’s a great deal for them. They get to keep all the high demons out of their realm. But it’s not so great for werewolves, vampires, and rule-breaking wizards, is it? Hel, you don’t want to be banished to Sinistral, do you?”

  “Well…not really…because it’s dangerous there.” I understood what he was saying. “Yeah, it’s just like you’re saying. Ethereal wizards have a gated community. If I was tossed out, I would be vulnerable, and Bevan would be in danger too. If the doors are open, the playing field levels out.”

  “Well, I knew it was something like that,” Billie said. “I don’t really know who I believe, Gaston or Byron, as far as what Deveraux wanted. But I do know that even though I’m an Ethereal witch, the more powerful witches use the threat of banishment to keep the rest of us in line. My daddy was a Sinistral warlock, all because he dabbled in some dark magic when he was young, and they threatened my parents apart from each other. My mama still has feelings for him but she doesn’t dare so much as see him because she doesn’t want to get her and her familiar banished.”

  “Billie, that sucks,” I said. “I can see why you want revenge on the council. They will retaliate, though.”

  “I know. They always do.” Billie looked like she wasn’t planning on backing down.

  Jasper’s arms were crossed on the table. Jake had just grabbed a beer and popped the cap off. “I don’t know where the hell this is all going,” he said. “But I can’t see stopping now.”

  “So your friend Sam has the last piece, right?” I asked Byron. “He’s in California. But he isn’t dead yet, is he?”

  “Not yet…,” Byron said.

  “I know about Sam!” Billie said. “He’s a Hollywood lawyer! Deveraux said he met Audrey Hepburn at his house!”

  Byron raised an eyebrow. “Deveraux was also prone to exaggeration… Sam only knew the magical folk in Hollywood.”

  “Audrey Hepburn was just a normal human?”

  “Yep.”