by Terah Edun
The least they could do would be to answer her query.
The middle one pushed its horse forward. “We come at your bidding, High One.”
Surprise rocketed through her. It had worked.
And then death smiled. “No, but we will answer your query.”
Her surprise promptly sank into irritation.
“Why are you here?” she repeated.
It looked off in the distance. “Because death comes for you.”
“You are death,” she pointed out.
“No, that is what you call me in your mind’s eye. We are your Riders, your Protectors, your Guard.”
Her jaw dropped. “My guard from what?”
“Your enemies.”
“I don’t have any enemies.”
It turned its distant gaze back to her. “They will come. They already have taken two of your family. They will take more.”
Then it turned its horse around and the others followed suit.
“Wait, what do you mean they?” she asked desperately.
“You must go,” he said.
“Go? Go where?”
“To the dark queen’s court.”
There was only one dark queen that she knew of, and she ruled the city of Atlanta—her great aunt. The same great aunt’s whose court was off limits, courtesy of her father’s deathbed proclamation. She spluttered, “Uh, no can do.”
He didn’t turn around or contradict her.
“When your blood flows on the starlit floors, you will call on us. And we will come.”
Before she could say another word, they disappeared in darkness and mist. The sky cleared. Glass crinkled behind her.
She turned to see everyone in her class standing at the window, staring in fear and astonishment.
She swallowed. Looked at Connor. The same emotions showed on his face.
More reasons to fear the most broken witch in Bethlehem High.
Swallowing, she turned and left. Going to the parking lot. Going to Marigold. There was one person who she could talk to this about. One person who understood. She had to find Cecily.
Behind her she heard Connor say, “Katherine, wait!”
But he didn’t come after her. Even he wasn’t that stupid.
As she turned the corner, Katherine was shocked to see three SUVs peel into the school parking lot at top speed. Out of the cars poured guardians in three-piece suits and her mother just behind them. She blinked while thinking aloud, “That was fast.” Her mother was hyperaware of her powers and grew quite upset whenever she ‘used’ them, but even for her this was unreal.
One of her mother’s guards swept into the school while another came up to her with a brisk, “Keys, please.”
“What?” Katherine said while looking at him in a daze. She was starting to get scared. The queen was moving stiffly and the guards surrounding her were armed with enough magical protections to take out a S.W.A.T. team.
“To your car,” he explained in a clipped voice.
She handed over the jangle of keys with a muted point to the mangled mess that was Marigold in the parking lot. Walking past him, she ducked between guards to get to her mother.
“Mother, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” Katherine started to say. Then she got a close-up look at the queen’s face. As her mother took off her sunglasses, Katherine could see that her eyes appeared bloodshot, her makeup was ruined, and her hair was in disarray. Now, that was scary. Her mother never looked anything less than immaculate. Unlike Katherine, who’d once shown up to class with rollers still in her hair because she had forgotten to check the very top layer.
“Mother, what’s wrong?” she whispered.
Her face crumbling, the Queen of Sandersville took her youngest daughter’s hands in her own and gripped them tightly. “Something has happened to your sister, Rose.”
Katherine sucked in a gasp as she looked around as if expecting Rose to appear like magic.
“What? What happened? Did she get hurt? Is she in the hospital? How?”
Katherine knew that despite the availability of coven healers, her mother had always preferred to take her daughters to human doctors first, witch healers second. She said it was more sanitary. Rose thought she was hiding something, but what even she hadn’t been able to guess.
Katherine watched as her aunt emerged from the SUV behind them with a characteristic glare pasted on her face. The queen shook her blonde hair as her lips trembled and she practically collapsed in her Dolce & Gabbana pumps. “She’s dead. Our Rose is dead.”
Then Katherine’s world really dropped out from under her.
Chapter 6
As she watched the raindrops roll down the dark-tinted windows of the SUV she, her mother, and her aunt Sarah rode in, questions like how and when rolled through her mind. Turning to the queen, who sobbed quietly into her sister’s shoulder, Katherine had to wonder why.
Why had Rose died today? So soon, too soon. Katherine had thought she had a lifetime of arguments with her sister left. She never imagined she would wake up the next morning and find her gone...forever.
Sitting up stiffly, her mother blew her nose into a handkerchief. “Katherine, when I saw you at the school, I felt it—I felt your magic. You used your witches’ gift.”
Her tone was accusatory. Her voice hinted at betrayal even amidst her sorrow.
Katherine turned to her and swallowed deeply. “It was an emergency.”
Her aunt’s eyes narrowed. “Your life was in danger?”
“No,” protested Katherine. “It was more of a response to everything else happening around me. Our English teacher is horrid. I felt Rose’s death—I’m sure that’s what caused my gifts to surge this time, and on top of that the ghosts kept coming...”
“I told you not to talk about them!” shouted her mother.
Katherine narrowed her eyes. Of all of the things for her to focus on, why them? she wondered.
Even if it was out of character for her, it was ridiculous for her mother to keep pushing the topic of their appearance aside. They were real, Katherine was sure of that. With each passing incident it was also clear as daylight that the trigger of her powers could be connected to them.
Katherine sighed and rubbed her brow. I haven’t even told her about the riders yet. Looking at her frazzled mother, she wasn’t sure now was the best time to bring them up, either. It would be better to push the ghosts than try and convince her she had other realm protectors now. Wryly, Katherine thought to herself, Only to a witch would ghosts be more normal than fae.
“But Mother, I feel like they’re real, like I know them.”
The queen’s face trembled and her hands fluttered at her sides as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. But her voice was steady, even angry, when she said, “Katherine, weren’t you listening to me? Your sister has died. Leave the ghosts alone.”
But that steady anger didn’t last for long. As if the very mention of Rose’s unfortunate end brought back unwanted memories, the queen collapsed into her sister’s arms again.
Katherine turned away from her glaring aunt’s glowing red eyes and looked out the window again. So this was how it was going to be then.
She thought about what her mother had said when they first arrived in the car. Before the hysterics had started. Before the never-ending waterworks had come. Her explanation of Rose’s death had involved a downed airplane, Rose’s boyfriend Derrick on life support, a vanished guardian, and a dead heir to the Sandersville throne. Even if the plane that Rose had been on had malfunctioned, Katherine knew that the guardian could have saved Rose by teleporting her to safety. Hell, that was his one and only job. So why hadn’t he? Whatever the reason, this could not have been an accident. A witch, a warlock, and a guardian didn’t die by plane crash. It just didn’t happen.
As she watched the road to their house appear in her sight, Katherine had one question on her mind.
Why had someone killed Rose?
They arrived home and the guar
ds deployed in a ring outside. Katherine trembled from magical exhaustion and shock as she walked through the front door. Shock that the sister she hated would never be there to tease her again, never be there to smirk at her as she sauntered through the house, never be there to chide her for doing something wrong. Every incident she could think of that involved Rose came with a bad memory. But dammit, Rose had been her bad memory, her evil sister, her pain in the neck and now that was gone.
As her mother stumbled up the stairs in tears—presumably to go to her room—Katherine hurried to latch on to her aunt’s arm.
“Are they sure?” Her voice trembled.
Aunt Sarah turned to her. “They identified the remains magically and forensically. She’s dead.”
Katherine nodded her head in regret. Refusing to let the tears fall.
“A demon?”
“If it was, it was traveling at four hundred miles per hour.”
Katherine looked at her with incomprehension. “Is that possible?”
Her aunt barely kept herself from rolling her eyes with impatience. “No demon in existence could catch up to a Learjet.”
Katherine racked her brain for something she could come up with, any explanation. Frustrated, she asked, “What about Derrick?”
Her aunt raised her eyebrows. She didn’t say, “Who?” but Katherine got the feeling she didn’t know who Derrick was, and, more importantly, from the derisive expression on her face, she couldn’t care less.
“Rose’s boyfriend,” Katherine hurried to explain. “He was a wind warlock... Surely he would have done something or known what happened...what attacked them.”
Thinning her mouth into a thin line, Aunt Sarah said, “We don’t yet know if it was an attack...but if you must know, the other male on the vessel lived. We’ll question him when or if he arises from his deathbed.”
With that, she yanked her arm away and turned to hurry up the stairs after her distraught sister.
Leaning back again the front door with a thump, Katherine whispered, “What was Rose doing in an executive jet? And where was she going?”
Racking her brain, she remembered her half-awake conversation with her mother from this morning. Rose had been supposed to be going away on coven business ‘out of town,’ but as far as Katherine knew, coven business was always the next town over. Never across county lines, much less the state.
“Cecily would know,” Katherine said as she looked upstairs with a gleam in her eye. With her divination skills and something from Rose’s room, maybe Cecily could even find out what happened to her sister. Good thing Katherine knew just where Cecily was. If her cousin had skipped school, there was only one other place she would be—the shop.
Rushing up the steps two at a time, she grabbed one of Rose’s favorite scarves from her room and stuck her head in her mother’s door. “Mom, I’m going to see Cecily at the shop!”
The queen turned devastated eyes to her only living daughter. “For how long? We-we have to make plans.” Sobs interrupted her sentence.
Katherine wrinkled her nose. She had always hated displays of emotion, especially ones with large amounts of tears. In her opinion, crying wouldn’t help Rose, action would.
“Not long. She’ll need help closing up the shop early if you’re not there anyway.”
The queen thought about it as she gripped her sister’s gloved hand tightly. “You’re right.”
“Aunt Sarah, is there anything you want from the shop or for me to tell Cecily?” Katherine said, peering over at the woman who was Cecily’s mother and wore enough kohl eyeliner to be a pharaoh of the Nile Empire.
Aunt Sarah sniffed in disdain. “Nothing except that I’ll be away for the next few days—to retrieve Rose’s remains.”
“Right,” said Katherine, slowly backing away.
As she closed the door, she said, “I’ll tell Cecily she’s staying here, then.”
“No, you will not,” said her aunt sharply.
Katherine blinked at her around the half-closed door. “Why the hell not?”
“Katy, manners!” snapped her mother through tears.
Katherine grimaced. “Why ever not, dear Aunt Sarah?”
Glaring at Katherine as if she was stupid, her aunt said, “Because I need her to watch our house.”
Katherine opened and closed her mouth. She wanted to say their house would be fine. Those damn carnivorous plants would live and the fire-breathing goat would certainly survive. She wanted to say that she needed Cecily as much as her mother needed her sister. But she didn’t.
“Katherine, dear,” said her mother quickly before her fiery daughter could say something she would regret.
“Yes, Mom?”
“I think I need you to see to some things around the town for the next two days while I deal with this. You and Cecily can do it together. You’re old enough. After that you can check on Sarah’s house. How does that sound?”
Katherine gritted her teeth. “It sounds great, Mother.”
They both turned to look hopefully at her demon-hunting aunt, who shrugged. “It suits me.”
“Great,” muttered Katherine as she slipped out and closed the door.
Through the door she heard her mother scream, “Take two of the guardians with you!”
Katherine decided that she didn’t hear that part.
Standing at the front door, Katherine pushed back the window curtains that hung to either side to assess the situation.
She could only see a few guards. So she dipped into her powers, second nature by now, to check their auras. She could sense six guards ringed around the house like a horseshoe. The two closest to the shed were already dealing with Gestap’s irate demands—she could tell that from their angry red auras. The others that made up the guards coming up on the left and right side of the property had more sedate orange auras.
To her surprise, no guards were directly in front of the house. Narrowing her focus, she felt two auras farther out near the front gates.
“Must be the missing two guards,” she murmured to herself. With a smile she noted that they’d parked their big black SUVs in a row on the front lawn.
“Don’t mind if I do,” she said while slipping out the front door quietly.
There was no way she could get Marigold off the property quietly, much less without the threat of breaking down. Marigold was a delicate creature. These SUVs were monsters ready to be let loose. Opening the driver’s side of the one closest to her, she slid into the seat and hunched over. Quietly shutting the door, she got to work pulling large hairpins from her hair. She always kept them on hand for situations like this.
“Well,” she admitted with her mouth full of hairpins, “not exactly like this.”
Marigold tended to breakdown or malfunction twice a week like clockwork. Katherine had gotten very good at patchwork fixes. Plus she lost her keys like the dickens and sometimes needed a fast way to start the engine—that is, when the starter had actually worked. With a little magic, the hairpin as a conductor, and a lot of luck, she got the black SUV to start.
Smiling, she sat up fast—only to see the guards running around the house with guns drawn.
Eyes wide, Katherine put the truck in reverse and gunned the gas. The SUV shot backwards toward the tree line like a bat out of hell. She quickly corrected her course with a swerve of the wheel while praying the guards didn’t start firing at her.
She heard them shouting as they ran forward. Her name came up. They recognized her. Good. They wouldn’t shoot her, then. Putting the SUV in drive, she set off down the driveway at sixty miles an hour. Breezing past the gate and the guards who quickly dove out of the way, she hit the pavement with a squeal of tires.
She had the absurd feeling that Rose would be pleased. Hell, she was getting out of the house and doing it in style.
Making her way from the house to the shop from there was easy. She actually felt a hint of disappointment that the guards hadn’t tried to follow her. It had felt daring, exciting, a
nd a bit like being in one of those cop shows when she pulled out of the front yard. But she dreaded hearing what her mother would say when she got back.
As she parked in front of the store, she said to herself, “Let’s put off going home as long as possible. I’m more likely to survive that way.”
Stepping out of the black behemoth with a fond pat of the SUV’s hood, Katherine pocketed the keys and walked up to her family’s shop. Run by the Thompson line of queens since before her great-grandmother wrested control of the town and all of its inhabitants from her Cajun partner, to Katherine it was a second home. She had been toddling across its ancient and knotted hardwood floors since she was three, so she knew the northwest corner had a moldy-growth of spores that the sprites loved to take a nibble out of. Katherine also knew that her mother used those same spores for her tempest teas. But that wasn’t even the one top one-hundred greatest thing about the shop. In her top ten memories of the shop would be the time she had seen an archangel descend from the rafters, and all the times she’d crafted more spells than she could count on the ancient wooden table in the shop’s center that held the register and assorted packages in progress.
Now she sighed in relief as she noted the “We’re Open” sign on the front of the shop door. Cecily must be holding down the storefront. Only family ran the shop, and Katherine could count the members of her family in Sandersville on one hand. All female, too—Mother, her aunt, Cecily, herself...and Rose. A sharp-edged smile of sorrow and resentment crossed Katherine’s face as she thought of her sister. The sister that she had just been arguing with at the foot of the stairs last night. The sister who had been alive until fateful events this morning.
“I guess I don’t need all five fingers anymore. Not to count family, anyway,” Katherine said sadly. She walked into Thompson’s Apothecary and Herb Shop with the jangle of doorbells above her ringing away.
As soon as she entered into the store that smelled like herbs and ground cinnamon, she stopped cold and groaned aloud.
If the day could possibly get any worse after destroying her classroom it just did. Being told she had to go see her evil great aunt, finding out her sister was dead and peeling out of her yard with a guaranteed grounding for a month when she got back, had nothing on this new encounter.