Accession

by Terah Edun

  “So,” said Ethan softly, “what happened to Rose, and where’s Cecily?”

  “We find Cecily, we can keep trying to find out what happened to Rose,” she said.

  Shivering, Katherine continued, “I just hope she’s all right. Something just doesn’t feel right.”

  Ethan nodded. “I hear you. If you want to leave Marigold parked in the lot, we can drive over to the house in my car.”

  Katherine nodded, did as he suggested, and hopped in. As they drove along, she said, “I’m going to try her one more time.”

  She dialed again.

  Immediately they heard Cecily’s distinctive ringtone in the car. Frowning, Katherine and Ethan looked at each other, and then he pulled over to the side of the road.

  “It’s coming from the trunk,” Ethan explained.

  Turning off the car, he hurriedly unbuckled his seat beat and raced to the trunk. Katherine did the same. Hurrying together, they popped open the trunk to find a bright pink cell phone ringing on the floor mat in between some cable hooks. No other sign of any of Cecily’s belongings anywhere.

  Katherine grabbed the phone and pulled away as Ethan slammed the trunk door down with a frustrated yell. “Dammit, Cecily. Why would you leave your phone somewhere?”

  Katherine shut off her phone and quickly entered Cecily’s passcode.

  “She shared her code with you?” he said, mildly impressed.

  “Of course,” she said, shifting away from him. She could feel his presence in the air. It was like an electric current between them. Always had been.

  If he noticed her shift, he didn’t say anything.

  “Check her messages and calls,” he said.

  “Already on it,” she muttered with her head down.

  Her attention caught on a series of texts that Cecily had received two days ago.

  “Listen to this,” she called out to Ethan. “‘Deliver the specimens within twenty-four hours.’ ‘One has died, do you wish the girl to perish, too?’ and a final message: ‘Come to us or we will take what we want.’”

  Chapter 24

  Grimly, Ethan said, “Let’s get to the house.”

  They got back into the car and wasted no time rushing up the steps of the old stone manor that Aunt Sarah had repossessed, literally, from a gang of ghouls and made into their home.

  Fishing a key out from his pocket, Ethan unlocked the door and they walked into a clearly empty home. Light dust gathered, and Aunt Sarah’s giant pet salamander had left a trail of poop from one end of the foyer to the other. Something neither Cecily nor her mother could stand to walk over. The minute they stepped through the door it would have been cleaned up.

  “Big surprise,” Ethan said darkly. “She isn’t here.”

  “Who? Cecily?” Katherine asked.

  “Her mother,” Ethan said bitterly. “Some people aren’t cut out to be mothers, and I have to say she’s one of the few that I’d wholehearted agree is one of those people.”

  “She’s pretty standoffish, but she cares,” Katherine objected almost automatically. That was her blood aunt he was talking about, after all.

  “If was just the fact that she travels alone for weeks at a time hunting demons, I wouldn’t have mentioned it,” Ethan said gruffly. “But it isn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked as they slowly made their way into the living room.

  Ethan walked over to Cecily’s favorite part of the house—the corner that housed her baby grand piano, Aunt Sarah’s only concession to Cecily’s obvious love of music. She had said when she presented Cecily with the instrument that the sounds of the piano were the only live music she could stand and Cecily wouldn’t be playing anything in the house, even though she was also gifted with the cello, flute, and harpsichord. Cecily had been so happy to receive the gift that she would have agreed to anything in that moment.

  Katherine swallowed as she opened the cover up and trailed her fingers along the pristine keys.

  “What did you mean, Ethan?” she prodded gently as she turned around to look at him pacing the room.

  Ethan looked at her and then said slowly, “Did Cecily ever tell you about how many times Aunt Sarah would call her weak and pitiful? Make her practice over and over with a practice sword until her arms were blue from bruises and her fingers were so stiff that she couldn’t play the piano for a week?”

  Katherine frowned. “She might have mentioned something. I think she said Aunt Sarah just wanted to toughen her up. Make sure she could defend herself.”

  “She wanted to do more than that. She wanted to break Cecily.”

  “Break her?” whispered Katherine horrified.

  Ethan snorted disdainfully. “They were as different as cats and dogs. I honestly don’t know how something as sweet and kind as Cecily came from that. Which is why we need to get her back.”

  Katherine nodded. “I think we need to search the house at the very least.”

  Ethan agreed. “You take the top floor. I’ll take the main floor and the basement. Meet back here?”

  She nodded and headed up stairs, pausing to watch him head into the basement. In the fifteen minutes of opening every room door, checking every closet and bathroom, and even peering out the windows, she didn’t find any sign of her cousin.

  Rushing back down to the main floor with a frustrated growl, Katherine found Ethan back in the living room.

  “Nothing?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he replied glumly.

  “Now what?” she said, throwing up her arms. “I thought her mother would be here and she’s not. There’s no sign of Cecily or even where she went. How do we track her down if we have no idea where to go?”

  Ethan tilted his head in thought. “I may have an idea. Where’s the cell phone?”

  Katherine raised an eyebrow. “I left it in the car.”

  He walked out of the room without another word. When he returned she was sitting on the couch and wringing her hands anxiously.

  “You think we should tell my mother?”

  “I think we should have some definite proof of where she went first,” Ethan said firmly.

  Katherine nodded.

  She watched him place himself in the middle of the room. Carefully he lowered the pink cell phone to the ground between his feet. Then he was still. Looking straight at the ground with his hands by his side and his hair shielding his face.

  Before she could call out, she felt his magic rise and saw it emerge. A pool of light appeared under his feet with thin tendrils of light emerging from the surface. The tendrils reached out like vines and struck out to hit multiple points in the room. And then they all reversed from their various points on the wall to hit one spot: the surface of the bright pink cell phone.

  “What’s going on?” Katherine asked.

  “It’s going to show us the last place Cecily had a real live conversation on or near this piece of junk,” Ethan advised her.

  Katherine was beginning to think he was projecting his anger in more ways than one, but she watched the light show calmly. Hoping it could tell them something about where Cecily had gone.

  Slowly she became amazed. Because light filtered out of the beam from the phone and slowly transformed the vision of what they were seeing everywhere in the room. The living room slowly transformed into a place she knew well. The shop—the ceiling, the walls, the glass jars, the plants, the cash register, the door. It was all there.

  “Wow,” she murmured as she stood up.

  He looked up at her with a grin after a moment. “It’s going to take a few minutes more to get the history to appear. It’s a big like accessing a down file server and regurgitating the memory.”

  She blinked at him. “I have no idea what you said.”

  He sighed. “Give me two minutes.”

  She shrugged and turned to stare around herself again in awe. She hadn’t know he could do this and she was anxious to see what he meant by ‘file server.’ Maybe it had something to do with what he was or
his heritage. Ethan wasn’t a warlock, she knew that much. But they hadn’t had an actual conversation about what he was and wasn’t before, either—she only knew that he was clearly inhuman and not a warlock. Not for her lack of trying. He had always evaded the topic or outright changed the subject when she brought it up. At the time her mother had hated him because he wasn’t a warlock and Katherine had been perfectly happy with her disapproval.

  Ethan said in the quiet, “You can use the cell phone now. I don’t need its presence while I do this.”

  Katherine nodded. “I’ll check for more messages.”

  She turned on the pink phone and got to work, but there was nothing more wicked there than the two messages they had seen earlier and a couple hundred texts between Cecily and herself.

  “Nothing else,” she said, defeated.

  Ethan frowned darkly. “What about the ones we were able to read earlier? They both came in two days ago.”

  “One after the other,” she said shakily. “Which means if she left to meet them, then she could be missing as long as forty-eight hours. This isn’t good.”

  “I know,” he responded.

  “What was Cecily mixed up in?”

  “I don’t know,” he said in a fierce tone, “but I’m going to find out.”

  Katherine nodded. She believed him. Biting her lip, she said, “Your magic. Is it going to call up her last conversation?”

  “Not on the phone itself,” Ethan said, standing still and glancing at her in surprise. “But it will call up the last few minutes surrounding the time she used the phone.”

  Then the lines of light from his magic flashed like a strobe light in a club, then they spread out in thick pools of light so that the entire room was bath in light. Stepping closer to Ethan, Katherine watched as he called up the history of the shop through the aura around them.

  “It’s like watching a television,” she said in wonder. The only difference was that a television had sound.

  “But a hell of a lot harder.” He grunted in strain as the aura TV flashed back to this morning just as her mother left the shop. They watched as Cecily wandered around straightening object and fulfilling orders when patrons came in. Then, close to eight a.m., when she should have been in homeroom, two things happened. Cecily crouched over in pain for a minute then straightened.

  “That must have been when Rose died,” Katherine said, “Cecily’s always been more sensitive to family than I am.”

  “And this?”

  They watched as two men approached Cecily in the shop. One hung back to deter other people from entering near the door. Cecily watched them nervously. They spoke only for a few minutes before she left with them.

  “She didn’t even try to fight them!” Ethan cried out in frustration.

  “Three of them. One of her,” said Katherine. “And all of them from the Other Realm. Even I wouldn’t like those odds.”

  “You noticed that, too?” Ethan asked.

  “I’d be blind not to recognize a daemon when I saw one,” Katherine retorted angrily. She wasn’t angry at Ethan. She was angry at the daemons who had taken her cousin.

  “We need to tell her mother,” Ethan said grimly.

  Katherine grimaced. “Just what I need. More of Aunt Sarah.”

  “You and me both,” Ethan whispered. “But if there’s anyone who can recognize and hunt down a daemon, it’s Cecily’s mother.”

  Sitting down, Katherine asked, “Now how do we find her?”

  Ethan banished the lingering effects of the image and said, “Who do we know that your aunt makes sure to inform of her plans no matter what?”

  They looked at each other as Katherine rolled her eyes at the obvious answer. “My mother.”

  Ethan nodded. “Let’s go to the queen.”

  They left her aunt’s house without a further word and headed back across town to Katherine’s home to explain to the Queen of Sandersville that another of the Thompson line was missing, and this time they could do something about it.

  When Katherine walked through the door of her home, she took a deep breath and hoped her mother knew where Aunt Sarah was.

  Asking a guardian as she made sure they waved Ethan through, she said, “Where’s my mother?”

  He answered politely, “Out back, miss. At the gazebo.”

  Katherine stiffened and directed Ethan to drive around the back of the house. They parked near the door to the mudroom and started walking on the dry grass to the small pavilion-like structure that had housed her sister’s remains until three days ago.

  When they got close enough, Katherine saw her mother kneeling in prayer with the gemstone necklace of Hecate’s blessing in her hand. Sorrow rocketed through her. Her mother had never been a particularly devote discipline of the coven religion before, so to see her at it now told Katherine exactly how much she must be hurting inside from her daughter’s disappearance.

  Clearing her throat, Katherine approached the white gazebo, but didn’t go up the steps and go inside. She just couldn’t. It was like entering a tomb unprepared, she wasn’t sure what she would find. If lingering remnants of Rose’s spirit would be there. If it would torment her or bring her peace. And she didn’t want to find out. She just wanted to find Cecily and go home, avoiding everything and everyone in her life that was making her feel so very miserable.

  Her mother’s head rose and she stood, slipping the gemstones in the pocket of her dress and smoothly exiting the gazebo.

  “Katherine and Ethan,” the queen said in surprise, “what are you doing here?”

  She left off the word ‘together,’ but Katherine could hear the subtle disapproval in her voice.

  Guess she still doesn’t like Ethan that much.

  Katherine said in a rush, “We think Cecily’s missing, and what’s more, we think it’s an urgent matter.”

  The queen frowned and said, “Walk with me.”

  Chapter 25

  With Ethan and Katherine on either side of her they walked not toward the house, but closer to the forest with her royal guardians trailing not far behind.

  “Your Majesty,” Ethan said, his voice dark, “Cecily hasn’t attended classes for two days now. Her mother explained that they were going to be in town on coven business and yet, they are nowhere to be found.”

  Speaking in a less-formal tone, the queen said with familiar warmth and quiet in her voice, “Yes, Cecily and my sister were supposed to have, as you say, coven business, but Sarah’s occupation took her elsewhere earlier this week.”

  Katherine watched Ethan’s mouth thin into a line. “And why didn’t she say anything?”

  “About what?” the queen said coolly.

  Ethan’s eyes flashed and he didn’t back down in the face of his queen. This was his sister they were talking about, and Katherine knew that he felt he had the right to know her whereabouts.

  “That she was leaving,” he said tightly. “I would have watched over Cecily.”

  “She told me,” her mother responded, “and I will watch over Cecily.”

  “Like you watch over Katherine?” Ethan lashed out without thinking.

  The queen’s eyes widened in surprise and hurt before the emotions on her face wiped away as if they had never been there and Katherine’s mother was gone. In her place stood the Queen of Sandersville.

  “I think, young man, that it is time for you to leave before I do something I regret,” she said.

  Her guardians surged forward at some invisible command to grab a hold of Ethan.

  “Mother, no!” Katherine said frantically. “He didn’t mean it. Besides, he’s telling the truth. We can’t find Cecily! It’s urgent.”

  “Remove him from my property,” sniped the queen, and Ethan could say no more because one of the talents of the guardians was a silencing gift. He was dragged away and Katherine was left to plead for her mother’s leniency.

  They stood in the middle of the field face-to-face. One with desperate eyes. The other with an immeasurable look
of concern.

  “Mother, I’m sorry we interrupted you,” pleaded Katherine, “but you must listen to reason. Something is gravely wrong with Cecily, and you have to extend all of your resources into finding her.”

  “I do, do I? And who is queen here?” the queen said angrily.

  Katherine briefly closed and re-opened her eyes, “That’s not what I meant. I’m just worried.”

  Finally the queen sighed and rubbed her brow. “If it will ease your fear, Cecily came to me two days ago. She said she was going out of town on her first demonic voyage and she would be back within the week. It was time.”

  Katherine reared back in shock. “Cecily? On a demon hunt? She’d never do that.”

  “She comes from a long line of demon huntresses. Her father’s mother was one and so was her mother’s mother and her mother.”

  Katherine narrowed her eyes. She didn’t want to debate lineage with her mother now. Although she was very much aware that the queen’s mother and her sister’s mother were different individuals. It was why the younger sister was Queen of Sandersville and the older one was not.

  “But Mother,” Katherine said in exasperation, “you know Cecily. You know she’s never hunted a thing in her life. Why would she start now? This makes no sense!”

  The queen waved a hand. “As I said before, I coddled you and your sister. Sarah has decided it’s time that she stopped coddling hers. She let Cecily go to prove that she is worthy of the mantle.”

  Katherine shook her head adamantly. “Cecily would never do that.”

  “She did,” said her mother. “And you need to follow her example. It is time to take on the full responsibilities of an heir to Sandersville. I’m setting you on coven rotation tomorrow.”

  “No, Mother!” Katherine wasn’t exactly sure if she was protesting her mother’s characterization of Cecily or herself. It all felt like too much. She had never wanted to be Queen of Sandersville, and now it was all being dumped into her lap.

  Her mother’s patience wore thin. “You have to grow up sometime, Katherine. You can’t stay in the forest with Gestap forever. You must learn to lead, and this is the best way I know how. My word is final.”