by Karen Leabo
“You don’t have to be sorry. Please don’t.…” She was so confused, her throat hurt. She remembered what her mother had said, about how Tess never allowed anyone to touch her. She’d never before considered how her aversion to touch must have affected Morganna. It must have made her feel rejected, unloved, particularly because Tess never really explained it to her mother.
“You can touch me if you want,” she said now to Nate. Impulsively she grabbed his hand and brought it up to her face. What am I doing? She looked up into his eyes, and for a moment all else receded—the house and all it represented, the curse, everything. There were only the two of them in this great vacuum, with waves of warmth pulsating back and forth between them.
It was so amazing, how he made her feel, as if she were in a protective cocoon, or bathing in warm lotion. But it went beyond that. She felt a tingling deep in her core, a hotness between her legs that wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly, but it made her want to squirm. Her palms went damp.
She was aroused. In this awful place, she was suddenly aware of herself as a woman as she had never been before.
She’d been aroused a few times in the past, so she recognized it. But the other times she’d been looking, not touching.
“I … I …” She couldn’t articulate anything. He came closer, and she realized with a sense of awe mingled with fear that he was going to kiss her.
He did. Her mind exploded with pleasure, expanding to take in every outward sensation—the texture of his mouth pressing insistently against hers, the firm warmth of his hand where it had slid behind her neck, the sound of Nate’s breathing, and the pounding of her own blood through her veins. The sensory overload effectively blocked out her psychic receptors. For a few moments more she reveled in the purely physical realm.
Then a fluttering sound overhead jerked her back to reality. She pulled away from Nate. “What was that?”
Nate was looking around, too. “A bat?”
“Oh, God, I hate bats. Let’s find the stupid book and get out of here.” She pulled away. He let her, though reluctantly, it seemed.
Since Tess knew the house better, she volunteered to face the upstairs. She rifled through her mother’s old closets, looked under the bed and in bureau drawers. Everywhere were reminders of the nightmare her life had become—pictures and statues of demons, ceremonial bones and knives, religious symbols that had been reversed or otherwise perverted. There was almost no trace left of the beautiful, gentle magic Morganna had performed when she was plain old Mildred DeWitt.
Tess became almost numb from the constant onslaught of hideous vibrations. Yet she pressed on. The book had to be somewhere.
She heard a yelp from downstairs. She ran to the landing and called down to Nate, “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered sheepishly. “Are you?”
“I’m okay. Any sign of the book?”
“No.”
When she finished searching the upstairs, she pulled down the attic stairs and climbed up, but all she found were a few dusty boxes with Christmas decorations that hadn’t been used in twenty years. Morganna didn’t believe in celebrating Christian holidays.
With no small amount of relief, Tess rejoined Nate downstairs. He was methodically checking the book titles on the shelves in the den.
“She wouldn’t have kept it here in plain sight,” Tess said.
Nate jumped. “Hey, don’t sneak up on me like that.” But he smiled at her.
“What made you yelp earlier?” she asked.
“Oh, that. I opened that closet over there, and something jumped out and tried to kill me. A devil or something. I wouldn’t recommend looking.”
But Tess was already drifting toward the closet. Something was teasing at her memory. She opened the door a crack. Two sightless eyes peered at her from the darkness.
“Oh, I remember!” She opened the door wider to reveal the stuffed head of a ram, complete with huge, curved horns. “It’s Ernie.”
“Ernie?”
“Mother bought him at a garage sale. He was our own private Horned God.”
“Horned … you mean like the devil?” Nate asked dubiously. He came to stand behind Tess and have another look at his nemesis.
“No. He’s one of the main deities of the ancient religion. The Catholic Church turned him into the devil back in the days when they were burning witches and heretics. But he’s not such a bad guy, just the Goddess’s consort. And …” Following a sudden flash of intuition, or maybe memory, Tess stepped away from the closet. “Would you mind lifting Ernie off the wall? Maybe he’s guarding something.”
“Sure.” Nate did as she’d asked, putting the ram’s head aside.
Tess stepped into the closet and started feeling around, pushing and prodding the plywood planks. Finally one of the boards gave a little under pressure, then sprang open.
“Eureka!” There was a thick, leather-bound book sitting in a niche, along with Morganna’s most sacred ceremonial tools—a knife, a silver chalice, a white candle, and a censer.
“What’s all that other stuff?” Nate asked, leaning into the closet to have a better look.
Tess resisted the urge to lean closer, to let just his hair brush her cheek. She was getting dangerously close to being obsessed with the idea of touching him. “Those are a witch’s basic tools. The knife, or athame, represents earth; the chalice, water; the candle, fire; and the censer, air. They’re used for almost all ceremonies.”
“Should we take them with us?”
Tess hesitated. “No. They’re Morganna’s personal tools. If we need anything like that, we can buy them new.”
“Okay.” Nate scooped the book up. Tess noticed that, unlike everything else in the house, the Book of Shadows was scrupulously clean, without even a speck of dust to mar the tooled-leather cover. It was as if the dust were afraid to land on it.
She nixed that thought. It’s just a book, she chanted silently. It can’t hurt me.
“Can we go now?” Nate asked. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some fresh air.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Nate put Ernie back into his dark home. Then, the two them moved fast to get out of the house.
Nate sat with the book on his lap while Tess drove back toward Boston, but he didn’t open it or make any comment about it for several minutes. He felt embarrassingly uneasy about delving into Morganna’s private world of magic and mayhem.
He was also thinking about the kiss he’d shared with Tess, and what it meant. Was she thinking about it too? Or had the practicalities of their current predicament overridden a momentary, foolish burst of passion?
Well, he’d never been one to act coy. “Are you sorry you kissed me?” he asked, just to get the ball rolling.
She turned her startled blue eyes off the road and toward him for an instant. “No. Are you? Sorry you kissed me, that is.”
“No.” Well, that hadn’t gone much of anywhere.
“Look, Nate, I can’t think about that right now. It was a nice kiss—no, a great kiss, a fantastic kiss, but I can’t think about it right now. I need to be tranquil and clearheaded to work magic.”
A fantastic kiss. He savored her words. What guy didn’t like to be told he was a great kisser? But apparently she wasn’t keen on repeating the experience anytime soon, not until she’d completed her “magic.” All the more reason for him to do everything he could to assist her.
Did that make him a sorcerer’s apprentice?
He opened the book. The pages were yellowed and brittle, but not crumbling. Still, he treated them gently. A number of names were inscribed in the flyleaf, the last being Morganna Majick. Oddly, the one above it was Mildred Hampton. “Was Hampton your mother’s maiden name?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Interesting. It was almost as if Morganna thought of herself as a separate entity once she’d rechristened herself Morganna. “What am I looking for, anyway?”
“A spell for removing a curse
. Or anything that sounds like it might work.”
The first few pages contained sketches of various plants and flowers, and their purported medicinal qualities. “How old is this book, anyway?” Apparently it hadn’t belonged to Morganna originally.
“That particular book is over a hundred years old, I imagine. But the information, particularly at the front, is much older. It was copied from my great-grandmother’s grimoire, which, in turn, was copied from another ancestor’s. That’s why the writing is so hard to read and the wording is so peculiar.”
Peculiar, to say the least. It was almost like trying to read Anglo-Saxon.
He worked his way deeper into the book. There were recipes for various brews designed to relieve stomach pain or soothe a sore tooth, to induce childbirth, to heal cuts. All pretty benevolent sounding to Nate. But gradually, as he turned the pages, the “recipes” turned more fanciful. This one kept a husband faithful, that one brought in a bountiful harvest or caused a cow to give more milk. The instructions became more complex, too, involving more than simply brewing tea. There were timetables to be met, phases of the moon to take into account.
Suddenly he remembered Morganna’s parting words—something about the full moon.
“Tess, do you happen to know what phase of the moon we’re in?” he asked.
“It’s a waxing moon. Be full tomorrow night, I think. Why?”
“I think that might become important.”
He continued reading, fascinated. He wondered if Tess would let him reproduce a few pages. They would make great graphics for his article.
His article. It was shaping up into one terrific story. Now, if he could just convince Tess that letting him write it wouldn’t hurt her. He could change her name and some other pertinent details so that even her closest friends wouldn’t recognize her. But he realized that now wasn’t the time to talk with Tess about his story. She wouldn’t want to deal with it now. She had other tilings on her mind—namely, taking the steps that she imagined would save her friend’s life.
He glanced over at her. As they neared town the traffic had turned heavy, and she was concentrating mightily on her driving.
Nate turned another page of the grimoire and felt a sudden chill shimmy up his spine. “ ‘A Spell to Counteract Black Magick,’ ” he read aloud. “Could that be it?”
At that precise moment, as they pushed through an intersection on a yellow light, a dump truck shot toward them from the cross street. Tess slammed on the brakes and did a squealing one-eighty. Her quick reflexes prevented the truck from broadsiding them on Nate’s side and possibly turning him into roadkill. But the truck still managed to clip the back bumper and send them into a light pole. Tess’s hood popped open and the horn went off.
She looked over at him with wide eyes. “Yes, that’s the spell.”
EIGHT
No one was seriously injured, Tess reminded herself as the cops drove away and she and Nate climbed back into her car, which was drivable if a little banged up. It could have been so much worse. But she was still trembling as she put the car in gear.
“Hey, are you sure you’re okay to drive?” Nate asked her, his voice full of concern. “I’ll drive if you want.”
“No, I’m okay.” Tess heard the catch in her voice and swallowed ruthlessly to get rid of it.
“All right,” Nate said. “You’re thinking the curse had something to do with this. Am I correct?”
“Of course you’re correct. And it did. The moment you turned to the correct page in the book, something awful happened to us.”
“Awful would have been if you hadn’t had a dozen witnesses who saw that the accident wasn’t your fault. Awful would have been if you were driving without insurance and had to go to jail. This was bad, but it wasn’t awful. It’s something that happens to dozens of Bostonians every week. Get some perspective.”
Tess rubbed her right temple, trying to dispel the tension residing there. “I hope you’re right.” Traffic was lighter, now that they’d spent the majority of rush hour filling out police reports. Because Nate’s house was closer, Tess drove there.
Nate had refrained from opening the book again. She wondered if that was because of her worries, or his own reticence to tempt fate. His logical side might be keeping up a strong facade, but deep down he couldn’t help but be worried about the curse. Coincidences and bad luck took one only so far.
She had a difficult time finding a parking space, but she finally managed to wedge her little car into a tiny spot in front of a Chinese take-out restaurant. The smells emanating from the restaurant were heavenly, and her stomach rumbled.
“Hungry?” Nate asked. “I’ll buy dinner. We haven’t eaten since breakfast, and this place has great food. Good vegetarian stuff.”
She was touched that he remembered her dietary preferences. “I’m starved. And I can’t concentrate on an empty stomach. By all means, let’s get some dinner.”
Nate ordered a vegetable deluxe dinner for her, and cashew shrimp for himself. The food appeared, packed in paper cartons with chopsticks and plenty of soy sauce, just the way she liked it. Nate paid, and she carried their dinner the four blocks to his apartment, inhaling the delectable scents. She tried not to look at Nate, carrying the Book of Shadows.
About half a block from the front entrance to his building, Nate stopped abruptly and threw one arm out in front of Tess, bumping her in the chin.
“What?”
“It’s that guy again.”
Instinctively, Tess ducked into a doorway. Her heart started that insistent pounding that had been so much a part of her life these past few days. “Did he see us?” She whispered, though the swarthy man was a half block away.
“I don’t think so.” Nate’s voice sounded edgy. “What the hell does he want?”
Tess peered cautiously around the brick doorway. The man in question was loitering outside Nate’s building, smoking a cigarette, acting as if he had nothing more urgent on his mind than enjoying the spring weather. But it was the same man, all right.
“I told you what he wants,” Tess said impatiently. “He wants the Cat.”
“Come on,” Nate said, dragging her back the way they’d come. “We’ll enter the building from the back. Then I’m going downstairs and have a chat with our mystery man.”
They ducked into an alley, following a similar path to the one they’d taken the night before, though they went around the fence this time instead of over it.
“I don’t think you should confront him,” Tess said. “He’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, so am I, when someone threatens what’s mine.”
Tess was surprised at the deadly vehemence she detected in Nate’s voice. She’d never heard him quite so … forceful before. She’d been thinking of him as easygoing, good-natured, quick to laugh. Now she realized she might have underestimated him. There was a hard edge to Nate Wagner, buried beneath the easy laugh and the twinkling brown eyes.
And what, precisely, did he consider “mine”? The only thing the swarthy man had threatened was Tess herself.
Something inside her trembled.
Nate put an arm around her shoulders as they made their way up the alley toward the back door of his building. Rather than shrink from his touch, she immersed herself in the sense of strength she derived from it. He radiated protection. It had been far too long since anyone had felt protective toward her.
Tess breathed a little easier when they reached the relative safety of Nate’s apartment. She focused on the food, clearing the coffee table and rooting around in his kitchen for a couple of plates.
“Do you want silverware, or just the chopsticks?”
He didn’t answer her. She found him standing at the window, staring down into the street.
“Silverware or chopsticks?” she repeated.
“I’m gonna go talk to him,” Nate said, never hearing her question.
“No! Nate, really, I don’t think you should—”
“I know how
to handle this,” he said, shrugging back into his jacket. “Stay here, lock the door behind me. I’ll be back in five minutes with some answers.”
Tess resisted the urge to fall on him, grab onto some body part, and try to keep him from going. She knew she wouldn’t succeed. “Don’t blame me if your food’s cold when you get back,” she said instead, pretending she didn’t care.
Nate waited until the man’s back was turned before he sauntered out the front door. He wanted the element of surprise on his side. The man turned casually back, then started. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He took an extra-long drag on his cigarette and threw it aside.
Nate strolled closer—within kicking distance. Unarmed, his only advantage should this confrontation get ugly was physical proximity. Martial arts weren’t all that useful from twenty feet away.
But the man didn’t reach for a weapon. He stood his ground, smiling nervously. “ ’Evening.”
“What do you want?” Nate asked without preamble.
“That’s what I like, a man who gets right to the point. My name is Tristan Solca.”
Nate took Solca’s outstretched hand with no small amount of trepidation. “Nate Wagner.”
“I apologize for alarming you and the woman last night. It was not my intention. I didn’t realize how it would appear, a strange man coming out of the darkness—”
“You knew exactly how it would appear, or do you always go around making friends with a knife? You might have frightened Tess, but you don’t scare me. What do you want?”
Any signs of civility vanished from Solca’s face. “I want the Crimson Cat. It is mine, legally mine. Morganna gave it to me. It resided in my home for years, until I was burglarized. I finally traced it to Anne-Louise’s shop, only to discover that this Judy Cosgrove had purchased it mere minutes before I got there.”
Nate’s stomach swooped. Tess had been right. Solca was after the Cat.
“What do I have to do with this?” Nate asked, feigning confusion. “Why aren’t you talking to Judy?”
“Miss Cosgrove is in a hospital room, fighting for her life. Anyway, she no longer has possession of the Cat. You do. And I’m willing to buy it from you. I’ll pay five hundred dollars.”