“Thanks for that,” he said with a nod at the mug. “How is Lena doing?”
“Oh, I think she’ll be fine. Hormones and pregnancy really do a number on a woman’s nerves. We tend to worry about everything this close to delivering. I think she’ll come around. Just give her a little time.”
“She doesn’t trust me,” he said. And then he thought, why not just throw it right out there, put his cards on the table? “I know I did a number on her before, when we were dating. Worked so hard to convince her I was a player that she bought it a little too much. But I keep getting the feeling there’s more to it than that.”
Selma sighed and sank down onto an old black metal trunk. She seemed deep in thought for a moment. “You know, you might be right.”
“You think?”
“I hadn’t given it much thought, but...yeah. When a woman brings a child into the world, she starts thinking big-time about her own childhood. The good things she wants to pass on...the not-so-good things she doesn’t want to repeat.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never heard Lena say anything bad about her childhood. She loved growing up with you, Selma. Don’t try to take the blame for—”
“I know she loved growing up with me. But she also grew up without her father.” Her brows drew together. “She was only three when he left us. She cried for him for days, but she was so little...I honestly thought she’d forgotten all about it.”
“She’s never mentioned it since?”
“Not once. But I should have known it was in there, maybe deeply buried...but still there. Kids don’t forget that kind of thing. And you know, it might very well be why she’s so quick to mistrust you. She might not even be aware of it.”
He reached for the mug and brought it to his lips.
“Ryan, wait!”
The cocoa burned, and he jerked it away again with a hiss. “Ouch. You’re right, that needs to cool for a minute.” He set the mug down.
She sighed in apparent relief, looked from the mug to him, and wrung her hands a little.
“You okay, Selma?”
She nodded, forcing a smile that was as weak as his own had been earlier. “So what are you reading about?” She nodded at the book.
“Bound spirits. You know, bound to a house the way that ghost of yours seemed to be.”
“What made you want to read about that?”
“Just something Lena said about it seeming to be angry about your ghostbusting. She said it seemed almost...irrational. Desperate.”
“And what have you learned?”
He frowned. “Well, for one thing, they’re not always ghosts. Any number of things can pass from their plane—into ours through a...a doorway, but that wasn’t the word they used.”
“A portal,” she said.
“Yeah, a portal. If it’s left open, you can get a lot of traffic. I mean, I never believed in any of this stuff, and frankly, I’m a little stunned to find myself researching it as if it’s real. But I’ve seen so much since I’ve been here....” He gave his head a shake. “If there is one of these portals nearby, then theoretically at least, all sorts of beasties could have come through. Demons, spirits, divinities, lesser gods even.” Then he shrugged, feeling a little sheepish. “Listen to me telling you. You already know all about this stuff.” He reached for the cocoa.
She covered his hand with hers. “Still too hot. Please, keep talking, Ryan. There’s no way I know everything in every one of these volumes. A wise woman never stops learning.”
“Okay,” he said nodding. “Okay. So if there is a portal nearby, and if your house ghost or whatever he is did come through it, then he might be stuck here. The book says entities that enter our world that way can sometimes be bound to the area in the immediate vicinity of the portal until and unless they manage to...what was the term?” He opened the book, flipped pages, then said, “‘Manifest in the physical.’”
She blinked. “And does the book say how, precisely, such an entity would go about doing that?”
“Not that I’ve found so far.”
“Mom?”
They both turned to see Lena coming up the ladder to join them. “I just checked outside. It’s a full-blown sleet storm, just like Bahru predicted.”
“Were you planning to go somewhere?” Ryan asked.
She shrugged. “Not really, I was just nervous. I could have the baby anytime, after all. I want Doc Cartwright to be able to get to me. Right now the news says no unnecessary travel. A lot of secondary roads are already closed.”
She met his eyes. “Ryan, I’m sorry about earlier. I was—” She broke off as she looked around, taking in the books piled around him, the cocoa cooling on the nearby crate. Then, out of the blue, she sent her mother a furious look. “I said no!”
“I made an executive decision,” Selma said. “But I’m already having second—”
Ryan reached for his cocoa as he wondered what the hell they were talking about. It had to be drinkable by now.
“Ryan!” Lena lurched toward him, tripping over nothing at all and flailing wildly. He sprang to his feet to catch her, and she hit the mug and sent it flying across the attic. It smashed into a wall and shattered just as he caught her and drew her against his chest to keep her from falling. Though the contact felt good, she’d damn near scared him gray. “What the hell, Lena?”
“I...saw a mouse.”
He frowned until his eyebrows met, searching her face, completely certain he was in the middle of a conversation that was flying right over his head. “Are you okay?”
She nodded and gazed up at him in a way that made him think she was over whatever had upset her earlier and was back to adoring him again. God, her mother had been right about pregnancy hormones. One minute she was terrified of him, the next she was looking like she wanted to kiss his face off.
He knew for sure that he wanted to kiss her face off. He felt himself being pulled closer but stopped when he heard her mother gently clear her throat. His hands on Lena’s shoulders, he waited as she steadied herself.
“Ryan was just reading about spirits sometimes being bound to areas near the portals through which they entered our world,” Selma said. “The text says that in such cases they can break that bond only if they can manifest in the physical.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “But how do they do that, exactly? ‘Manifest in the physical’?”
Lena blinked and looked from him to her mother and back again. “It means it needs a body. It can’t leave the area until it gets one.”
“So it can’t let the body it wants leave the area, either,” her mother said.
Lena’s expression had changed again—to a look of pure, undiluted terror. Her eyes were huge, and darting back and forth. “That’s what happened with that freak storm the other night and the tree falling across the road right in front of us, and with the sleet storm tonight. We can’t leave,” she whispered. “It won’t let us leave.”
“Lena, what do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“It wants our baby!”
She turned and scrambled down the ladder so fast he was afraid she would fall. He heard her feet pounding through the hallway below, heard a door slam, and looked at Selma as if for answers.
She had tears running down her cheeks.
* * *
Lena ran to the temple room, and slammed and locked the door. She got it now. Their house ghost was no ordinary ghost. Somewhere near here—the cave, it has to be in the cave—there must be an open portal to the Otherworlds.
She grabbed the sea salt from the cabinet, waved her hand over it to empower it, then scattered it in a sloppy clockwise circle around the room.
This thing, whatever it was, had come through the Portal, and now it was looking for a body. Her baby’s body! Did it make any sense? No. She had no idea why thi
s being thought becoming a newborn infant would serve its purpose, whatever that might be. But did she believe it anyway? You bet she did. And Bahru, a man she had once thought was her friend, was helping it!
She threw the plastic container of sea salt aside and grabbed a bundle of herbs. Not sage alone, not this time. She wanted, needed, more power. She grabbed angelica, patchouli, sandalwood, orrisroot, snatching pinches of each dried herb from its jar and dropping them onto a concave abalone shell. Crunching and charging them all at once by rubbing them between her flat palms, letting them fall into the shell, scooping them up again and repeating. She visualized a ring of smoke that hardened into one of pure, impenetrable power, and muttered words to her unseen enemy as they came to her, without thinking first.
“I command you by heaven, by earth, by the river, by the power of mountains and lakes... The house I enter, you shall not enter, the door I close, you shall not open.”
And then she bit her lip, because while her mind had heard those words, had understood them, her lips had been speaking them in some other tongue. Some long-ago language. Akkadian, someone whispered inside her mind. And she began again, without even knowing how.
“Uta am i-i-ki, ana am, ersetam, nara-am...”
She grabbed her lighter and flicked it to life, touching the flame to the herbs and whispering the chant over and over.
The entity that had come through the portal wouldn’t let her leave this place, she knew it for sure. Whatever it was, it didn’t want her to escape its reach until her baby was born.
But that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying. And she would succeed, dammit. She would. Because she was a witch.
She carried the smoking herbs around the room, strengthening the circle she had made, and then setting them on the altar and letting them continue to smolder.
She had to get out of here, out of Havenwood, out of Milbury. But it would be easier and safer by day. Getting herself and her baby killed in an escape attempt would do no good at all. She just had to get through tonight. One more night. Just one. And then she would get out of town tomorrow. She would walk if she had to.
She got some holy water, the good stuff she’d been saving, collected from a midnight thunderstorm on the Summer Solstice and charged again beneath a lunar eclipse. A tiny pebble taken from the grounds of Stonehenge, a gift from a friend years ago, rested in the bottom of the bottle. She shook out the water, sprinkling a small, tight circle all around her. Then she sat in the center, her knees drawn to her chest, her wand in her hand.
The cat came and rubbed against her legs. Reminding her of the parchment pages, the letter. She quickly got up and retrieved them, sat back down, then sprinkled the water around herself again for good measure.
“It can’t get in. It can’t get in. It can’t get in,” she whispered.
Someone knocked on the door, and she damn near jumped a foot off the floor. But it was only her mother and Ryan. They took turns reasoning with her, pleading with her to come out.
“I’m not coming out until morning,” she told them. “It won’t hurt you as long as you’re not trying to stop it. You’ll be fine if you just leave it alone. I’m safe in here. The baby, too. We’re not coming out. So just leave us alone.”
She heard Ryan sigh. “Lena, please, hon. I’m not going to let anything hurt you. You know that. Please, babe, just come out. Things were going so well—can’t we get back to that? Please? You can’t stay in there all night, there’s not even a bed. Lena, come on, be reasonable.”
She went to the stereo, an old-school all-in-one that had dual tape decks in the front, a five-disk CD changer and a radio tuner. She pushed play, not caring what was in there.
“The Goddess Chant” began to play. She cranked it loud enough to drown out her mother and Ryan outside the door, and eventually they went away. But she kept the music playing. Its harmonies unfolded, built, entwined, empowered the energy of protection around her. Her arms around her belly, she sank to the floor in the center of the room, invoking her protectors to surround her on this night. To protect her child, and her, from whatever evil had set its sights on them. To empower her to take her daughter to safety at the first light of dawn.
Feeling stronger by the minute, she opened the envelope with her name on it, and began to read.
* * *
“It’s not good,” Ryan said. “She just doesn’t trust me.” He hung his head and walked away from the closed, locked door, knowing he wasn’t going to get through to Lena. Not tonight, anyway. Not now that she knew about the knife.
“But I do.” Selma put a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t, when I first learned about the athame—the knife—but I do now, Ryan. Listen, she’s scared. I told you what she said happened out there tonight, and I believe her. Thinking back, it seems that cat has been trying to get us to follow her since she first showed up here. And Bahru—I’ve got to tell you, Ryan, I’ve been feeling very uncomfortable around him since that night I blacked out. It all makes sense.”
“That there’s some kind of demonic force looking to take over our baby’s body? That makes sense to you?”
She shrugged. “I admit it sounds far-fetched, yes. Even to a witch. But look at her point of view, Ryan. She either chooses to believe it and do whatever she can to protect her baby, or she chooses not to believe it and risks the baby’s life. Not to mention her own. Which one is she supposed to choose? Which would you choose?”
He sighed. “I just wish she’d let me join her in that choice. It’s my baby, too. I want to protect her just as much as Lena does, but she’s shutting me out.”
“Well, on that I disagree with her. Now, I mean. Hell’s bells, I don’t know. But she must have a reason.”
“It’s that damn knife,” he said.
Selma lifted her brows. “Then you really were hiding it under the seat of your truck?”
He shot her a look. “Yes.”
“She asked me to take a look, tell her what I’d seen. I think she thought she might have imagined it or dreamed it or something. I looked, and there was nothing there.”
He sighed. “My father left it to me. Every time I touch it, it shoots sparks, sets things on fire. I’ve been trying to master it, but I thought it was too dangerous to keep in the house.”
She blinked at him. “And you didn’t tell her about this magical blade?”
“I intended to. But then she dreamed of me stabbing her in the heart with it as she gave birth. She described it to a T. I couldn’t very well tell her I had it after she told me that, could I?”
Selma looked at him as if he was stupid. “She found out anyway, Ryan. Wouldn’t it have been better coming from you?”
“I suppose.” He looked back at the closed door. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty.”
“Well, at least the solution is simple.”
He shot her a stunned look. “It is?”
“Of course it is. Give her the knife. Let her get rid of it or lock it away or mail it to Tibet.”
Rolling his eyes, he muttered, “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
She shrugged. “Because you’re male. You really have no idea where it is now?”
“That’s just it. I don’t. Someone took it from the truck, and it clearly wasn’t her, and it wasn’t you, either, so that only leaves—”
“Bahru,” Selma said. She turned and looked toward the closed temple room door. “You know, I’m not altogether sure she’s wrong to stay where she is until morning. Tell you what, I’m going to put up wards of protection around this house tonight. And you need to figure out how to get that blade back from Bahru. And then you need to shift the focus of your research just a little. Because your father didn’t just leave you a blade with some kind of mystical power. He left Lena something, too. A chalice. And those two tools are very closely entwined in the mystic tradition
s of the world. Very closely. There’s more to this than the two of you are seeing.”
He nodded, again looking at the door to the temple room. “What about Lena?”
“She couldn’t be anywhere safer tonight. It doesn’t look very likely that we can get her out of here before morning without risking all our lives. But unless you can get that blade back from Bahru, she’s not truly safe anywhere, Ryan.”
“You believe her dream, then? You think I—”
“Not you. But perhaps the blade. You must get it back, Ryan. And even then, we need to get Lena and the baby far away from here at first light.” She pressed her lips together. “If we can.”
* * *
Dear Magdalena,
My name is Indira, and I am your sister. I would say I was once your sister, in a previous lifetime, but the thing is, that lifetime never really ended. Because we left things undone, you and Lilia and I.
“Lilia,” Lena whispered. “Oh, my Goddess, is this for real?”
Long ago, we were harem slaves in Babylon. The king found out that we were also witches—and also that Lilia was in love with his most trusted soldier, Demetrius. We were arrested, tortured and executed...
“Yes, pushed from a cliff. As the prince raced toward us...but he couldn’t save us in time.”
Her eyes returned to the page, racing over the lines.
But for Demetrius, a far worse fate awaited. The high priest, an evil bastard named Sindar, stripped him of his soul and sentenced what was left of him to eternity imprisoned in a dark Underworld realm.
But we had a plan, we three. We did not cross over when we died. Our spirits snatched Demetrius’s soul from Sindar’s evil grasp. We split it into pieces and bound it to us, hiding it in magical tools that we then secreted away. Only we could find them. Or they would find us. And we each vowed to help Demetrius and set in motion the wheels that would make all this right again.
Daughter of the Spellcaster Page 24