Luther didn’t reply to that, but his aura flashed up again dark and heavy. The fear was there as it had always been, but this was a different fear; I got the impression Luther suffered from sleep paralysis, and maybe had a touch of insomnia. The bags under his eyes confirmed the story his aura was telling.
“Zis pocket realm you have constructed,” she said, “Free roam for ze dead is ze price you paid for it?”
He nodded.
Free roam for the dead? Did that mean there were ghosts all over the place? It would explain why my skin hadn’t settled down from that initial prickling at the door, and why I felt so damned uncomfortable in this place, the way anyone feels when they enter a house that’s just a little bit wrong. If the human body was like a conductor for all of the worldly energies, and even the not-so-worldly ones, then a witch’s body was a superconductor, a magnet, and a battery all rolled into one.
“The price one pays for security,” Luther said. “Can I get either of you a cup of tea?”
I shook my head. All I wanted to do was get out of there. “If it’s all the same, I just want to get started on the reason why we’re here.”
Luther’s eyes fell on me again and then went to Collette. He nodded. “You kept your end of the bargain, so I’ll keep mine.” He went over to a window, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, struck a match, lit the cigarette, and then took a drag. The smoke rose from his lips in slow twirls until he exhaled long and deep and the puff of smoke from his lips erased the dancing ribbons. “Ask your question,” he said, looking up at the white sky.
I swallowed my apprehension, glanced at Collette, then back at Luther. “Do you know what her weakness is?”
Luther nodded.
“I need to know. I need to find out how I can kill her before she kills me.”
He turned his head in my direction, deep brown eyes narrowing into thin slits, and said: “Her weakness… is Fate.”
Chapter Fifteen
“What do you think?”
Michael Holm’s voice bounced off the inner walls of the empty George P. Raven High Centenary Hall in a lazy echo. Frank spun around, the tail of his long coat spinning with him like an obedient servant. He scrunched his face, eyed the dimensions of the place, made calculations. It’s too small.
“How many people are we going to fit in here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A hundred? Three hundred?”
Definitely too small. “You really think three hundred people are going to show up?”
Michael’s eyebrow arched upward, he smiled, and the dimple on his cheek popped inward. “People love Halloween around here more than they do the fourth of July. Didn’t you know that?”
“Stop it,” Frank said in a scolding tone.
“Stop what?” Michael advanced, effortlessly holding the shape his face had taken; a grin that sat half way between suggestion and defiance.
But Frank didn’t return the grin. Instead he scowled, his eyes narrowed into slits, and he lowered his head. Michael had told him he looked like a cat when he did that sometimes, a cat with stiff legs and fur rising to touch the sky. He had told Frank that it may have put other people off—and he was sure that it did—, but that he found it kinda cute. Many adjectives had been used to describe Frank in his life, but cute hadn’t been one of them.
Not until Michael came along, at any rate.
“We’re never going to get this done if you insist on distracting me,” Frank said.
“Am I distracting you?”
They were close, now. Close enough to touch. To kiss. And Michael kissed him, then. Soft and tenderly, with a hand cupped behind Frank’s neck. A lover’s kiss. And Frank felt his stomach flip and roll and… float. He broke the kiss, tugged on his eyelids with his eyebrows, and smiled.
“Maybe I was distracting you,” Michael admitted.
“You were. Now stop being a little slut and let’s try and figure this out.”
Michael’s grin transformed into a winning smile that lit up his tanned face and caused slight creases to poke out of the sides of his almond eyes. He hated Michael’s ability to disarm him, to make him feel vulnerable, but he also cherished it; even if he couldn’t ever tell anyone, least of all that Red Witch.
She still hadn’t replied to his messages. I bet they’re both just getting wasted and eating bratwursts, he thought. Of course, he knew that wasn’t true, but he thought it anyway and frowned at himself. He suspected they were having a good time in Berlin, or were at the very least hadn’t run into any problems. He would have known if they had.
He just would have.
“Alright,” Michael said, “So, we’re going to fit two hundred people in this place, plus a stage, maybe a band—”
“Woah, a band? Where’s this all going to go?”
“There’s room, okay? Trust me. I have an eye for these things.”
Frank’s disbelieving lips pursed into a thin line, but he guessed Michael was right. He had once been a landscaper and now he was in interior decoration. Cliché? Maybe, but no one could deny the guy’s talents. He smiled again, but the smile made him want to bash his head against a wall. What the fuck is this? Somehow, in the last couple of months, Frank had turned into a… a… he didn’t know what the heck it was, but he knew he was changing into something, morphing. Not quite evolving. No, evolution implied a step forward, but Frank felt like he was taking a step sideward. Not quite caterpillar to butterfly, but maybe moth to butterfly?
Frank hadn’t decided whether he even wanted to be a butterfly, but the feeling was there all the same. Intruding. Pervading. Invading. What a mess. He found himself smiling again, cheeks warming, and he spun around on his heel looking for something, anything, to attack his feelings and send them back into whatever damned pit they had crawled out of.
When he saw Damien and Aaron carefully padding into the building through the open side-door he knew he had gotten his wish.
“Thank you, universe,” he said under his breath. “Michael, gimme a second—I have no idea what these two are doing here but I better go talk to them before someone arrests them for trespassing.”
“Sure,” Michael said, “I’m gonna go talk to the man in charge and book this place.”
“Alright,” Frank said, waving his hand as he walked. When he got to Aaron and Damien, who were standing around the door—skulking, really—Frank said to Aaron “I’m not even going to ask you how you knew I was here; but it speaks a lot about you if you’re able to pick up my scent so easily.”
“Your cologne is pretty easy to follow,” he said, but his eyes meant business; as did Damien’s.
Frank cocked his head. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say this wasn’t a social call.”
Damien shook his head. “We need to talk,” he said. “It’s about Amber.”
“What about our illustrious leader? Has she spoken to you? Because she’s failed to message me and—”
“We think she’s in trouble,” Aaron said, with all the delicacy of a slap across the face.
Frank’s face darkened. He looked over his shoulder—Michael had disappeared—and pushed Aaron and Damien out the door they had come through, back to the outside. The sun was bright and high in the sky, parting the light cloud cover with its sheer force of will to warm the ever cooling autumn air around Raven’s Glen.
“Trouble?” Frank asked when their only eavesdroppers were chirping birds and rustling trees. “What kind of trouble?”
“We don’t know,” Damien said, “But something happened to Aaron last night and I—”
Damien cut himself off. For a moment Frank was tempted to peel aside the veil occluding his thoughts and dig to find the words he couldn’t say, but he decided not to. He suspected he wouldn’t have to dig very far, but figured if Damien wanted to say something he would have said it.
“What happened to you?” Frank asked Aaron.
“I passed out. My phone rang. I thought it was Amber, so I picked up and then I… heard something. Then
I passed out.”
Frank’s eyes went to Damien, then back to Aaron. “What did you hear?”
“Something I haven’t heard since Yule last year.”
He had said enough. Frank’s mind as solid as a steel block without the imperfections. He, Aaron and Amber had talked, at length, about the occurrences around Yuletide last year and knew what the sounds Aaron and Amber had heard on their phones had been. The words seemed to sit on his lips—no, hold on to them, refusing to leave—and he gave up trying to say them, but he thought them.
The voice of the demon.
“Have you tried calling her?” Frank asked.
Damien nodded. “A few minutes ago, but her phone’s dead. She must have turned it on by now, right? This is Amber we’re talking about. She lives in her phone.”
Frank nodded, Aaron too.
“Alright,” Frank said, “You guys go back to the house. I’ll join you in twenty.”
“What are we going to do?” Aaron asked.
“You’re going to sit pretty and watch, you delicious man. I, however, am going to go to the attic and make contact with Amber the old fashioned way; Magick.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Fate?” I asked, incredulous, “You mean to tell me that I came all this way only to be told that Fate would be my enemy’s weakness? I can’t work with Fate.”
An angry heat was rising in my chest. My cheeks were warm, body buzzing with adrenaline, heart pounding hard against my temples. What kind of an answer was that? Forget prophecies. I wanted something real, something I could use right now.
“Amber,” Collette tried to say, but I wouldn’t let her.
“I mean, give me wolfsbane, silver, or holy water. I would even go out and find the flying-freaking-nun if it meant I could take this bitch by surprise.”
“Look,” Luther said with a voice like a slap from a velvet glove. “I understand your need perhaps more than most. But there is a good reason why she is still running around causing merry hell. She is close to immortal.”
“We didn’t come here for you to tell us that,” I said, “We came here for you to tell us how she can be killed. You obviously know I have a part to play in all this, so what is it?”
Luther’s eyes went to Collette. She arched her eyebrow in response but said nothing. My anger paused to take a breath.
“I have no intention of giving you the run around,” Luther said, “Let me start from the beginning, shall I?”
I nodded.
“Every once in a while there comes a greedy witch who wants a shortcut to power. That witch, then, seeks out the beast to grant her such power, but as with every Faustian pact, there’s a catch. The catch in this case is a prophecy; that one day a child would be born of witch and wolf, and she would have the power to kill the devil’s witch.”
“The Red Witch,” Collette said.
Luther bowed his head in acknowledgment. “Although the books don’t call her the Red Witch, but we can call her that if it’ll make the narrative flow more smoothly.”
“What has the Red Witch got that no other witch has?” I asked.
“The Red Witch has the power of both her parents and Fate on her side, and Fate is more powerful than the beast. Even the beast must obey the laws of Fate. Its minions—demons—can see the future, but they can’t change it with the wink of a twisted eye.”
“Zat is why zey possess humans,” Collette put in, “To effect change on behalf of zeir master.”
“Yes, but,” I said, pausing to think, “There’s more to this. A demon tried to possess me. In one of the books I found it said… the child of witch and wolf, the one that we now know has the power to kill the devil’s witch, can be turned away from the course Fate put her on. If she’s touched by the hand of the devil, it would herald the end of all witches.” My hands went to my stomach. Another instinct. “The book was talking about whatever child I have with Aaron, right?”
“Aaron?” Luther asked.
“My fiancée. He’s… a werewolf.” The words almost sounded stupid as they struggled to come out of my mouth, but then I remembered where we were and who we were talking to… and it still felt stupid. It was as if the teacher had called me up to the middle of the class to deliver an oral presentation of my choosing, and I had chosen to talk about unicorns.
“Then it’s true,” Luther said to Collette, “We’re looking at prophecy incarnate.”
Collette nodded and added “But she iz not pregnant… are you?”
“Fuck no,” I said, “No. We’re careful.”
“Fate isn’t careful. If you aren’t pregnant yet, you will be; and soon.”
Hadn’t Frank said the exact same words?
My head started to spin. The room seemed to be swaying, as if the whole cottage had been put on the back of a ship and then thrown out into a stormy sea. I reached for one of the wooden supports and held myself up. The formerly angry heat engulfing my body was now a dizzying one. Collette, sensing this, came to my side and bid me to sit down.
Whirling, spinning, rocking. Pregnant. I couldn’t possibly be… pregnant… not yet, anyway. Not now. More spinning. I ran my hands through my hair and sighed. “I can’t be pregnant,” I said as if I was trying to convince myself more than them. “No, I know I’m not pregnant. I would know if I was.”
But maybe I wouldn’t know if I was. I had been waking up pretty rough these last mornings, and maybe I hadn’t quite been as careful with Aaron as I would have wanted to. Did we use protection the other night when I woke him up? Shit. I couldn’t remember.
Part of me wished I had listened to Frank and maybe set a no-sex rule with Aaron; “no sex until this is all done, okay?” But the heart wants, and the body obeys. That’s just the nature of being human. Logic doesn’t always come into the picture, and when it does come in it sometimes shows up at the worst time; when it’s too late.
“If I have a baby with him,” I finally said, “What’s going to happen?”
“It’s hard to say,” Luther said, “But when I was fighting her, I tasted her fear of you. I didn’t know who you were or what you looked like, only that you were real and that she was afraid of you. Her soul was laid bare to me for the briefest of instants, but an instant is all it took for me to see what I needed to see.”
“And what you saw sent you running,” Collette said.
“Wouldn’t you run too? She knew she wouldn’t die at my hand. Why should I have even tried?”
“You made ze right decision in trying to escape, but hiding in here helps no one.”
“So what was I to do, then? Go after her again?”
An argument began. It didn’t rise like a crescendo, it just exploded. Collette was on the side of honor, telling him he should have found other witches to help him deal with this woman, who was obviously a threat. Meanwhile he was arguing that it was either his skin or hers, and he chose his. Neither of the two were wrong, and that was the sucky part. What would I have done if I had been him? I didn’t know. What I did know was that their voices were starting to melt into each other, and before long their individual intonations had merged to create a single monotonous drone to accompany the high C ringing loudly in the back of my head.
Somewhere in the cottage a clock cuckooed. I didn’t jump, but the sound caught my attention and somehow drove me deeper into my own thoughts. The moment of clarity that followed was like watching the thin orange line of light spread across the horizon with the rising of the sun, and watching the sky go from blue, to rose, to yellow. Suddenly, everything clicked into place.
Collette hadn’t brought us all the way here to listen to a story we had heard before. We had read the book I had taken from the priest the night of Aaron’s transformation. We knew the story maybe even better than Luther did, even if he had helped us understand its nuances a little better. No. She had brought us all the way here to enlist his help. Of course, I had no way of knowing this with any kind of logical certainty. It was just…
Instinct.
<
br /> “We need your help,” I said, cutting through their ethical argument.
Luther swallowed. He tugged at his waistcoat, looked at me, and said “I’m giving you my help.”
“No, you’re telling us more of what we already know.”
“You wanted to know what her weaknesses are, and I’ve told you what they are. You are. Your power, your blood, it’s what the witch both wants and fears most of all. What more do you want?”
“You,” Collette said, revealing her true purpose.
“You can’t have me,” Luther said, shrinking away into his cottage like a cat that had gotten fed up of being stroked and now wanted to go somewhere dark to hide, and maybe sleep. “Now I think you should leave.”
“Memento mori,” Collette said, taking a step toward him. “Remember zat you have to die. Zese are ze words by which all Necromancers live, non?”
Luther couldn’t deny it. I watched his lips press into a thin line and for a moment thought he was about to throw Magick at us. His fingers flexed and clenched, flexed and clenched, but he did nothing else. “I think you should leave,” he repeated.
“Do you know ze spell of trans-location?” Collette asked, ignoring him.
He narrowed his eyes. “I know of it.”
“Zen you know zat in order to use it one must have had contact with ze intended target.”
“Don’t.”
“You have had contact with her, and you have lived. Zis makes you unique.”
“I won’t.” Luther kept shrinking away from Collette, but she kept coming. Insisting with her eyes as much as her posture and her words.
I had heard of the spell of trans-location before—a spell that allows a witch to cross great distances in the blink of an eye, as long as she has something to anchor herself to—but I had always considered that kind of Magick to be way too far out of my league. Spells that broke the laws of reality in such a massively vulgar way weren’t the kinds of spells I wanted to be using.
And yet…
“You have to help us,” I said, standing, “I don’t want anyone else to die. If there’s a chance—even a little one—that we can get to her while she’s not expecting us, we have to try.”
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