Behind the man, standing upright between two bookcases, rested a pair of black caskets wrapped in shining silver chains. As Connor watched, one of the boxes vibrated as if whoever or whatever was inside was beating against the lid with clenched fists.
“Where am I?” Connor asked, sitting up and fighting back a sudden wave of vertigo. “Who are you? What did you give me?”
“My, my. Such a barrage of questions. You are in my temporary home, a cavern lying under the range near Brown Mountain. I am Irenaeus Chesterfield. You are suffering the mild after effects of a compliance potion. It ensured that you would come with me amiably rather than staging some kind of useless, enervating fight.”
“What do you want?” Connor asked.
“And more questions,” Chesterfield sighed. “How tedious. For the present, I want nothing but to talk with you about your parents.”
The statement appeared to confuse Connor even more. “They’re dead,” he said. “They died when I was just a baby. I don’t know anything about them.”
“I have no doubt about the veracity of the second half of your statement,” Chesterfield said. “But your parents are not dead. Their names are Jeff and Kelly Hamilton. The witch, Jinx Hamilton, is your sister.”
Connor pushed himself upright. “Wh . . wh . . . what are you talking about?” he stammered.
“Let me indulge you in a little family history lesson,” Chesterfield purred. “Your parents abandoned you in Shevington. You have no magic, you see, so you were quite useless to them. They gave you to Endora Endicott to raise while they tried again to have a normal baby.”
“That’s not true,” Connor said hotly. “Nobody would mistreat a baby just because the child had no magic.”
Chesterfield’s eyes darkened ominously. “I assure you, that is far, far from the truth. You and I suffer from the same birth defect. I, however, found a way to awaken my magic, and with my help, you will do the same. Together, we will exact revenge from those who have wronged us.”
“I’m not going to help you do anything,” Connor said resolutely. “I may not have magic, but I know evil when I see it. I won’t help you.”
Casually, Chesterfield motioned as if to reach forward. When he did, Connor’s hands went to his throat as his face contorted in pain.
“Air is rather a valuable commodity taken for granted until it is no longer in abundance,” Chesterfield observed mildly. “You think you will not help me now, but you will, once you realize that in your current state you are nothing but a helpless, defenseless mortal.”
As Connor struggled to speak, Chesterfield rose and walked toward him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps that you long to fill your lungs with fresh, life-sustaining oxygen? Very well. Breathe.”
Collapsing on his hands and knees, Connor gasped raggedly.
“Think over my proposal carefully,” Chesterfield said. “I must attend a funeral now. When I return, I will ask you again. If your answer is not to my liking, I will arrange a second persuasive experience for your consideration.”
Still fighting not to pass out, Connor didn’t look up until a different voice said, “Psst! Psst! You there. On the floor. He’s gone. Come over here to the chessboard.”
Greer held a cream-colored envelope out to Tori. The red sealing wax was broken, but when reunited, the two sides revealed an ornate family crest. “What is it?” Tori asked.
“Chesterfield’s signet,” she said. “Take a look at what’s inside.”
Dreading what she would find, Tori took out a single photograph. It showed Connor Endicott on his hands and knees between two caskets wrapped in silver chains. He appeared to be choking. Silently, Tori passed the picture to Kelly, who in turn handed it to Jeff.
“What does it mean?” Kelly asked, her voice breaking. “What’s wrong with him?”
Although Greer’s eyes conveyed the sympathy she felt for Kelly, she stayed focused. “Look at what’s written on the back,” she said.
Flipping the print over, Jeff read, “I will be in touch.”
“How in the hell did Irenaeus Chesterfield get my boy?” Jeff demanded. “And what are we going to do to get him back?”
From the full-length mirror to his left, Jinx’s voice said, “We have to find him first, Dad.”
28
We had no way to follow Chesterfield. Going back to Shevington seemed like our best and only option. When we came through the portal, I was relieved to discover that the wind had at least died down. Since my grandfather saw everything we saw over the drone feed, a horse-drawn sleigh waited to take us to my grandfather’s house.
When I came through the front door, I didn’t even bother with a greeting. “Tell me you have a way we can find him,” I said.
From the look of uncomfortable indecision on his face, I knew Barnaby did have a possible solution, but it wasn’t one he liked.
“Come sit by the fire,” he said. “There is something I need to tell you.”
I’m going to try to spare you all the complications and just focus on the vitals. You should already understand that the Daughters of Knasgowa are a matrilineal magical line. Knasgowa’s second husband was a Scotsman named Alexander Skea, but that was his adopted name only.
Alexander’s great-grandparents were the Creavit sorceress Brenna Sinclair and a castaway named Hamish Crawford. When the hapless man came to understand the true nature of the woman who carried his child, he colluded with a local Druid to imprison her in a cave after the birth of the baby. The Druid, who was a Skea, took the child to raise as his own.
For three generations, the sons of the Skea line were raised alongside their adopted brothers. A few years after Alexander came to the United States in 1786, his “brother” Duncan Skea the Younger followed him.
When Duncan arrived in the New World, Alexander insisted they have no association with one another because Brenna wanted to use Alexander to help her found her own magical line and she had a habit of killing the real Skeas when they got in her way.
Duncan refused to leave the area, however, arguing that since the two men had no real blood relation and didn’t resemble one another, Brenna would not come after him. He took a Lowland Scot name — Hamilton.
Yep, that’s right. My truck-driving, dedicated fisherman father was descended from a pack of Druids on the Orkney Islands. The Hamiltons remained around Briar Hollow, but with each generation, grew farther and farther from their Druidic roots, with one exception. All of them worked with wood or had an affinity for animals.
Eight generations down the line, Jeff Hamilton married Kelly Ryan, uniting the Daughters of Knasgowas with the patrilineal magic of the Skea Druids, which meant my dad and my brother probably possessed untapped magical abilities.
“There is a significant risk involved,” Barnaby said, “but if you were to work blood magic with your father, I believe you could awaken Connor’s powers.”
Stunned by what I was hearing, I said, “And what good would that do? Connor wouldn’t have any idea what was happening or how to use his magic to get away from Chesterfield.”
“That is true,” Barnaby agreed. “But once his magic has been awakened, you can use Myrtle’s tsavorite amulet to scry for his presence.”
“You’ve lost me,” I said. “I can’t keep up with all this magical jewelry.”
“It would be a long, translucent green stone hanging from a silver chain,” he said. “The stone is a means for communicating with the spirit realms and has a deep affinity for blood.”
Oh. That thing. Myrtle used it to test Tori’s loyalty to me since Tori and Gemma are, technically, Brenna’s descendants as well through the child Alexander Skea fathered by Knasgowa.
Now I understood Barnaby’s plan. “Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”
“This will mean breaking the news to your father that he may have magic,” Barnaby said. “How will he take that revelation?”
“Honestly?” I said. “I think he’ll be relieved.
He doesn’t like it when he can’t keep up with us.”
While we’d been talking, Lucas had been poring over Barnaby’s map of the portal system figuring out a route to get us back to Briar Hollow. He kept up a low running conversation with himself as he worked that sounded like a round of play from that old TV game show Name That Tune.
I kept hearing things like “that would take seven jumps” or “we can do it this way in five.” Finally, he slapped his knee triumphantly and declared, “I can get us there in three jumps.”
It took all my self-control not to shoot back, “I can do it in two.” Both men would have taken me seriously, and the explanation would just have taken too long.
So, as absurd as this is going to sound, that is how I returned to Briar Hollow via Two Egg, Florida, with a layover in Dime Box, Texas before taking the portal to Nowata, Oklahoma, which allowed us to pop into the woods outside Briar Hollow where Tori picked us up in my cherry red Prius.
We filled her in on the way to the shop. All things considered, Dad took the news pretty well until I produced a dagger and asked him to roll up his sleeve.
“What for?” he asked suspiciously.
Tori piped in cheerfully. “Don’t worry, Jeff,” she said. “I’ve done this with Jinksy before. You won’t have to actually open a vein.”
“Good to know,” Dad said, starting to unbutton his right shirt cuff.
“Has to be the left,” I said, stopping him. “That’s a more direct line to the heart.”
Dad switched sleeves and sat in one of the chairs. I asked him to sit one of the corners of the work table in the lair. I positioned myself so we would be able to co-mingle our blood over the map Beau had spread out.
Tori held the tsavorite amulet, which had already begun to pulsate quietly.
“Why is it doing that?” I asked.
“There’s a lot of power in this room,” Greer said. “The stone senses all of you. The pulsations bode well for the success of this effort.”
Meeting Dad’s eyes, I said, “You ready?”
He nodded and never looked away as I made a long cut across his forearm, repeating the same cut on my own skin.
“Take my hand,” I said, “like we were going to arm wrestle.”
My hand disappeared into my father’s, and instantly his flowing blood stood away from the skin, snaking across the space between us to mingle with mine.
As Barnaby instructed, I whispered, “Quaerere.”
Search.
The bloody tendril moved toward the tsavorite in Tori’s hand. She allowed the chain to uncoil until the stone hung over the map. Mom laid her fingers over the back of Tori’s, and then Gemma joined them. As we watched, the blood wrapped itself around their joined hands, and the silver chain began to sway.
“Are we supposed to do anything other than sit here and bleed?” Dad whispered.
I shook my head, and he fell silent again as the chain’s arc extended before coming to an abrupt halt. It quivered, suspended at a 90-degree angle, before plunging toward the map with such force the tip of the stone impaled itself at a location in the mountains of the Pisgah National Forest.
It would sound cool if I told you that Chase took out some kind of magical navigational thingy and figured out the coordinates, but truthfully? He used Google Maps and dispatched every drone at our disposal to search the area.
“Tell me again what they’re using?” I asked, as Moira quietly healed first my cut and then Dad’s with a wave of her hand and a few whispered words.
“Do you know what ground penetrating radar is?” Chase asked.
“Kind of,” I said. “Isn’t that what the police use to hunt for buried bodies.”
“Yes,” he said, “but not just bodies. Anything under the surface. The drones are using the magical equivalent. They’re searching for Fae power signatures where there shouldn’t be any.”
Half an hour later, we had a hit. I’ll give the drone pilots credit. They don’t give up. As we watched, the lead drone began to look for a way into what seemed to be an impenetrable rock face. He tried cracks and crevices, following wind currents, scanning with minuscule searchlights, probing deeper, backing out of tight places. An eternity had passed before we were looking into the very chamber pictured in the photo of my brother.
Amid the static and interference, we could barely make out Connor, sitting with the musical chessboard.
“I knew we should have smashed that damned thing,” Tori muttered. “He looks like he’s talking to it.”
“Have the pilots found any way for us to get in there to him?”
Chase shook his head. “None,” he said. “Ironweed and his team at the command center have been studying the scans. The cavern is completely sealed off from the outside world. We’re looking in through a crack that’s no more than a millimeter in width.”
Just then the video cut out altogether.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The drone smashed into the rock,” Chase said. “The pilot says there just isn’t enough room to navigate in there. They’ll try to come up with a fix, but it won’t be fast.”
“Okay,” I said, “so that’s it. At least we know Connor is alive. Chesterfield said he’d be in touch. Now we wait to see what he wants.”
Connor looked down at the face of the alchemist trapped in the White King. “If we try this,” he said, “and fail, Chesterfield will kill us.”
“I fear he will kill us anyway,” Gareth answered. “All of the ingredients we need are on his workbench. Carry me there, and I will tell you how to mix the Bilocation Potion.”
“First,” Connor said. “I want to hear again how this is supposed to work.”
“You will drink the potion and dip me in the remainder of the liquid,” Gareth explained. “So long as you do not let me go, we will not be separated. For a few hours, it will appear that we are still here in the cavern, but I will use the same spell that put me here in the White King to transport us into Chesterfield’s fountain pen.
Connor chewed at his lip thoughtfully. “Because he always takes the pen with him?” he asked.
“Correct,” Gareth said. “The pen is covered in a decorative lattice of copper. The metal will prevent Chesterfield from detecting our hiding place. When he carries us into the outside world, we will escape at the first opportunity that presents itself.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“You will combine your powers with my own to eject us from the pen,” Gareth replied.
“That’s where your plan falls apart,” Connor said bitterly. “Didn’t you hear what Chesterfield said? I don’t have magic. I’m not normal.”
Smiling up through the wood grain Gareth said, “Do not be so sure, Connor. The Creavit wizard has badly misjudged you. Every night before he retires for the evening, Chesterfield writes in his notebook. He leaves the pen lying beside the book on the table. Mix the potion now, and tonight we will enter the pen. If Chesterfield hears anything, he will see our doppelgangers. It will be morning before he realizes we are gone, and by then, like the Greeks, we will be safely within our Trojan horse.”
29
Would it be incredibly disrespectful of me to say Anton’s funeral was kind of a letdown? The Strigoi Sisters didn’t show up and so far as we knew at the time, neither did Chesterfield. At the end of the service, as we filed past the grieving Ionescus, Cezar leaned toward me and whispered, “It will be done before the sun sets.”
When we returned to the shop, however, Mom met us in the back alley with the news that a second message had arrived from Chesterfield. In exchange for my brother’s safe return, he wanted a living branch of the Mother Oak.
“Where the heck did that come from?” Tori asked.
No one — Barnaby and Moira included — could answer her, but all agreed on one thing. If Chesterfield could threaten the integrity of the grid with amber amulets, what could he do with living sap? Even in the absence of a concrete answer, it seemed clear Chesterfield was
upping his game.
However, we had no intention of just slicing off a limb from the sacred tree and handing it over to a traitorous wizard. We agreed to table the ‘why” for now and jump to the “how” — as in how could we use this new demand to our favor?
If we weren’t going to pay the “ransom,” we had to at least make it look like we were in compliance. Moira returned to the Valley immediately to work on a solution.
Thanks to a concerted effort, the drifts in the lower valley had been cleared, and the road to Shevington was open again as well. The weather no longer stood in the way of our movements, which in itself was a blessing.
The elegantly penned note from Chesterfield ended with, “Tell Barnaby we will meet in Adeline’s garden. I so look forward to seeing it again.”
Speaking from the polished silver surface of the mirror in the lair, Barnaby explained the reference. “He is talking about my old home in Kent in the south of England. He has picked that location to taunt me.”
“He’s taunting all of us,” Festus grumbled. “That’s what the Creavit do.”
“Agreed,” Barnaby said. “Moira and I will be ready when the rest of you arrive.”
After he broke the connection, the rest of us dissolved into a bickering argument about who would go to England and who would stay in Briar Hollow and wait.
Both of my parents wanted in on the rescue mission, which was absolutely out of the question. Dad’s magic had started to awaken and let’s just say he was being a “erratic.” So far, he’d blown out every light bulb in the lair twice, inadvertently put Rodney in a clown suit, and levitated Beau’s rolltop desk six inches in the air.
Thankfully, Mom agreed with me. “You’re a loose cannon, Jeff,” she said, before rushing to add, “and don’t think about cannons, or anything else gun related. Think about something harmless, like M&Ms.”
No sooner had she said the words than a 5 lb. sack of M&Ms appeared in the center of the coffee table.
Witch on Third (A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 6) Page 23