by Faith Hunter
“Mol,” she said, “I dropped a stake.” She pointed to the fourteen-inch-long stake in the corner. “Would you go get it, please?”
“No,” I said instantly.
“Why not? You chicken?”
Anger shot through me. “I’m not going—” I stopped, and the anger filtered out of me. Around me the house seemed to wait, expectant, and I turned in a slow circle, standing in the doorway, letting my senses flow out, seeing the hand-carved woodwork, the once-elegant stairs leading up to the second floor, the carpenter’s ladder against the wall. Smelling the dust, the fresh wood, the dirt under the house, and the sweat of the workers from two days past. Hearing the small sounds an old house makes, the pops and quiet groans. Feeling the breath of the house as air moved through it, cool and moist from the open floor and up the stairs, a faint trickle of breeze. I opened my mouth, as Jane did, and breathed, almost tasting the house, its age, elegance, and history.
Midway around, I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. The magic I hadn’t noted pricked against my skin, cool and light, old, old, old magic, a spell frayed around the edges, one that hadn’t been renewed in decades. “A ward,” I muttered, “combined with something else. Maybe a keep-away spell. Yeah. I can feel it, feel them both, combined. It was a really good one to have lasted this long.” I opened my eyes and studied Jane. “How’d you sense it when I didn’t?”
“Dust,” she said succinctly. At my puzzled expression, she said, “Every room in this place has been walked over, beaten on, knocked down, and partially renovated except this one. The footsteps all go right up to the entrance”—she pointed down to the floor at our feet—“where they removed whatever had been covering the room. And here they stop. I was the first person to so much as step into the room.”
A small smile pulled at her lips, half-proud, half-embarrassed. “I’m guessing the spell treated me like a big-cat. And since hanging around you and Big Evan so much, I’ve realized that sometimes I can feel witch magics. Cool and sparkly on my skin.”
That was a surprise. Humans can only feel magics when the spell is directed at them, as in a keep-away spell that shocks anyone who touches the spelled item. But then, Jane Yellowrock isn’t human. I can do magic—it’s in my very genes, passed along on the X chromosome from parent to child—but Jane is magic. And scary sometimes.
“Okay.” I sat on the floor in the foyer, outside the opening to the parlor, and reached out with my magics. Immediately I saw the spell. It was mostly green, smelling of pine and hemlock and holly, marking the caster as an earth witch, like me. I held out my hands and touched the edges of the conjure; it flashed against my fingertips painfully, hot and cold together, with minute darker green flashes of deeper pain. Once I concentrated, I could see the parameters of the incantation and the place it was protecting, the far corner of the room where the dust was deepest. A bit of cloth was in the corner, like a man’s old-fashioned handkerchief, and an old newspaper, the rubber band disintegrated into blue goo from the heat and moisture of the long-sealed room. A curl of wallpaper had fallen across it too. I guessed that the spell was tied to an amulet, probably hidden beneath the trash. I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans.
“So,” I said, “I guess I need to push through the spell and get a feel for what is causing the problem.” The instant I said the words, a sense of dread fell on me. I knew, completely and totally, that if I went into the room, I was going to die. Worse, my child would die. I sucked in a breath, and it burned my throat. My husband would die. Tears started in the corners of my eyes. And the deaths would be horrible, painful, tortured deaths. It was illogical and stupid and clearly the result of the spell. But it was also real. I backed away, three unsteady steps. And the spell faded.
“Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed.
Jane was leaning against the molding in the opening, arms crossed, watching me. “Bad?”
“Totally and completely sucky.” I described what I had been made to feel by the spell. “Whoever created that spell was good. Really, really good. And frighteningly inventive.”
Jane nodded, only her head and the tip of her long braid moving. “The worker who nearly got brained by the magical flying hammer, was he getting ready to go in here?” she asked.
“Yes. Why?” I asked.
“Because that ladder”—she tilted her head to the metal stepladder—“wiggled when you decided to go in. I figured it was going to fly across the room and hit you if you didn’t back off.” Her lips pulled again in that half smile that was uniquely hers. “I was going to catch it before it hit you, of course.”
“Thanks,” I said, eyeing the ladder. “Like I said. That is a really good spell.” I pointed to the corner. “I have a feeling that the original incantation is tied to something in that corner. Maybe an amulet hidden under the trash.”
Jane nodded and uncrossed her arms. Stepping close, she pushed me farther away from the parlor opening and into the dining room opening on the other side of the foyer. Out of the way of flying carpenter tools, I realized. It was an odd dance step of a move, and Jane grinned down at me. She was a dancer, and I had three left feet and couldn’t follow her; I nearly fell. “Careful,” she said, holding me steady.
“Don’t get hurt,” I blurted.
Jane chuckled softly. “My reflexes are fast.”
“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Still . . .”
Jane shook her head in amusement and dropped to her knees again. She crawled into and around the parlor, one shoulder and hip brushing against the walls, just the way a cat would explore a room, around the outer edges first. When she reached the wallpaper and cloth on the far side, she batted the paper away in a move so catlike I covered my face to stifle a giggle. Then Jane grabbed up the cloth in two hands, held like paws, and rolled over with it, sending up clouds of dust. When her sneezing fit subsided, she batted the cloth away too, revealing a snake.
I lifted my hand to warn Jane, which was stupid as she had already lifted the snake to expose it as dry, cracked rubber tubing and small pieces of corroded metal. Jane said, “It looks like some weird kind of stethoscope. And this is the amulet, for sure. My hand is stinging, and some kind of green magic is running all over my skin.” She crawled across the room on three limbs, the stethoscope in her left hand.
It was a weird design, with two earpieces and two flat chest pieces. Near where a doctor’s chin might go, the two pieces were connected with a metal tube that had been wrapped in a circle, like a trumpet’s body, and, like a trumpet, the connecting part was clearly designed to increase and maybe modulate sound waves. The dangling pieces seemed longer than most stethoscopes, and the little circular chest pieces were decidedly old-fashioned.
Green magics emanated from them and were climbing Jane’s arm and wrapping around her body. Before she reached the doorway, and before the magic reached her head, she dropped the device and swatted it, just like an irritated cat. The spell instantly went still, into stasis, and Jane crawled out of the room, shaking her head, muttering, “I know. I know. I don’t like it either.” She crossed the entry to the room and stood, brushing off her clothes, scowling. But with Jane a scowl meant nothing; an expressionless face meant even less. At her best, Jane was inscrutable, and I’d always put that down to her being found in the mountains by park rangers, with no memory of anything, no language, no people, no nothing, and then being raised in a children’s home and learning how to socialize—or not socialize—in an artificial “family.”
Now that the amulet was closer, I knelt and studied it. From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased, but when I looked up, nothing had changed. Outside the windows, the wind picked up and buffeted the house. I shrugged and went back to studying. The chest pieces were made of some kind of plastic, maybe like that Bakelite stuff that was so popular in the early nineteen hundreds. If so, then that dated the device to that era. My grandmother had Bakelite jewelry, and it was quite collectib
le. The stethoscope was in fairly good repair, even the rubber parts, which one might have expected to disintegrate.
I heard clicks to my side and looked up to see that Jane had pulled a small digital camera out of her boot and was taking pictures of the house and the amulet. I made a small mmm of approval, but the photos might be blurred. Magics did that to photos sometimes.
From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased again, and developed a distinct rhythm. “Molly!” Jane shouted. Suddenly she was standing over me, her arms lifting high. She caught a wooden headboard as it roared down the stairs and slammed at me. “Out!” she shouted again, as she tossed the headboard and caught the flying footboard, using it to deflect a flying drawer or three from a bedroom upstairs.
Crouching to make a smaller target of myself, I raced for the front door, which flung itself open to allow me passage. Jane followed and the door slammed behind her. She pulled me to the street fast, the winds I had noted only moments before dying when we reached the curb.
“Is that the spell or is the house alive?” she demanded.
It might be a dumb or bizarre question to most people, but not to me, and clearly not to Jane. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed to ask Evangelina, my older sister and our new coven mistress since Mama retired and moved two towns over to take care of Grandma.
“Great. Just ducky.” Jane scowled as she brushed more dust off her clothes. “Fine. One thing I can tell you. A vamp owned that stethoscope. I could smell him all over it.”
• • •
Back in Asheville, I picked up my daughter, Angelina, from the family café, where my younger sisters were watching her, and arrived home, to our new house, before Big Evan did. My girl was worn-out after playing with my wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, which meant she went down for a nap while I fixed supper. I put Angie Baby in her bed and covered her with the blankie that Evangelina had crocheted while Angie was still kicking my insides out in the last horrible month of pregnancy.
When we painted the new house—after we lost the mobile home—I had chosen the soft sage green color for Angie’s room based on the blankie, which my daughter loved. Darker green leprechauns and earth brown brownies sat on huge calla lily leaves beneath a magical spreading oak tree. Unicorns pranced in the background and rainbows crossed the horizon beyond the tree, all painted by Regan and Amelia. What they hadn’t gotten in magical abilities they had made up for in artistic ability and talent. It was a room of love.
In the kitchen, I turned up the AGA, stirred the stew I had left bubbling on the stove, and put a loaf of bread in the oven. I also started a pot of brown rice, to stretch the stew so that Jane could join us. I couldn’t pay her for the work this afternoon, so the least I could do was feed her supper.
I knew Evan was home before he even turned into the drive. The wards we had put up around the house warned me, identifying his signature. He came in, work boots clomping, and put his arms around me. Evan is a huge bear of a man, easily six feet six, with red hair and beard, lightly streaked with gray. He is older than I am, but with witches’ expanded life spans, that matters less to us than to humans. When we met it was love at first sight. Lust at first sight too, but that was definitely the lesser of our earth-shattering reactions to one another. Evan was a witch, one of the rare male witches to survive to adulthood, and we were pretty certain that was why Angie Baby’s gift had awakened so early—she had a witch gene from each of her parents, making her the most powerful witch on earth at this time, so far as we had been able to determine.
“Whose magics you been playing around with?” he mumbled into my hair, which tumbled over my eyes and tangled with his beard. Mine was not nearly as bright red as his. “Do I need to worry that another witch caught your eye?”
“Absolutely.” I turned in his arms and wrapped mine around him. They didn’t quite reach around his shoulders, but the fit was perfect around his chest, and I clasped my hands together in the middle of his back. “I think you need to remind me that I have the perfect man at home and shouldn’t be playing the field anymore.”
“Is Angie in her room?” His voice turned up hopefully on the end.
I buried my face in the crook of his shoulder. “Napping very deeply. She’s making those little puffs of breath that she does when we just can’t wake her.”
“There is a God.” Big Evan picked me up and carried me to the bathroom instead of the bed, which worked out quite well to remove the sweat of the day from him and the construction dust and stink of vamp and unfamiliar magics off of me.
• • •
When Jane got to the house my hair was still damp, but I was clean—very, very clean—and I was dressed in a T-shirt and a fitted denim shift with full skirt and deep, tucked pockets. I don’t think Big Evan and I fooled her any, because she shook her head and smiled that small smile while looking back and forth between us. I had the feeling she thought we were cute, but at least she wasn’t the teasing type.
She woke Angie Baby and kept her busy in her room while I finished up the evening meal, and then carried my girl to the table. Angie usually fought being put into the high chair, wanting to sit in a regular chair like a big girl, though the table came only to her nose that way and I didn’t trust a stack of catalogs the way my own mother had. But tonight Jane surprised us all with a bright pink booster seat with Angie’s name painted on the back. It had little suction cups on the bottom and a strap that attached it to the chair; another strap attached around Angie’s waist, with an additional strap that looked special-made for Angie’s current baby doll. Angie squealed and chattered and was enchanted with her big-girl chair. And Jane’s face softened at Angie’s obvious delight.
Over stew—heavy on the veggies, light on the beef—Jane told us what she had discovered about the strange stethoscope. “It’s called a Kerr Symballophone, and it was designed in 1940 with two diaphragm chest pieces to allow doctors to hear different parts of the chest in both ears so they could differentiate the sounds from either lung, or from the top and bottom of a single lung, or from the heart and a lung. Kinda neat, really.”
I leaned into my husband and said, “She’s showing off her brand-new emergency medical training.”
“You took an EMT course?” he said, surprised.
Jane gave a minuscule shrug and tore off a hunk of bread. “Finished last month. I figured it might come in handy,” she said, her eyes on the bread and a smile tugging at her mouth, “for the day you finally give in to temptation and shoot Evangelina.”
Evan coughed and turned red. I laughed. I guess it was possible that he didn’t think his feelings about my eldest sister were quite so obvious. “You can’t choose your family,” I said sweetly. “More stew?” Evan nodded and Jane went on as I dipped up another humongous portion for my hubby. The man had to burn ten thousand calories a day.
“Anyway, I went to the Hainbridge Historical Society and did some research.”
“I didn’t even know Hainbridge had a history,” I said.
Evan chuckled, shoveled in a mouthful, and gestured for Jane to go on.
“There was a doctor by the name of Hainbridge living in the city in 1840.” She went back to the bread and dipped it into her stew, watching as the bread soaked up the thick broth. “And in 1870. And in 1910. And in 1940.”
“A family of doctors?” Evan asked.
I remembered the smell of vamp and said, “No way. He wasn’t—”
“Way,” Jane said. “I’ve seen two small portraits, hand-painted, seventy years apart, and except for the beard, it’s the same guy.”
“I’ll be,” I said. “I know we have a lair in Asheville. Word is that the head vampire wants to start a barbecue joint in town.” When Evan paused with his spoon in midair, I said, “Down, boy. So far, it’s just a rumor.” To Jane I said, “Barbecued ribs are his favorite. So. We had a lair here, way back when.”
She nod
ded and glanced at Angelina, her look saying there was more to tell but not in front of tender ears. So I had to wait for details, and waiting never sat well with me. I have red hair. Some form of impatience is surely bred into me.
• • •
When Angie Baby was finally down again for the night, and Jane and Evan and I were all stretched out in the tiny living room, Jane finally dished. “Hainbridge was a vamp with a human son. The kid came down with what sounds like leukemia, when he was a child in 1845.”
“Vamps can have kids? I mean, human kids?” Evan said.
“Sounds like it, but it must be really rare,” Jane said. “According to the records, the doctor tried everything to cure the kid, and instead of being cured, the kid went crazy. The local newspaper called him a lunatic. He was seven.”
“The father tried to turn his son to cure him of the leukemia,” I whispered.
“Yeah. That’s what I got out of it. And from what I’ve read, that’s not permissible, to turn a child. And just as bad, Hainbridge didn’t chain his child up.”
I looked across the room to Angie’s door. It was half-closed and I suddenly couldn’t stand it. I stood and crossed to the opening and looked in. Angie was curled on her side, her thumb in her mouth. She didn’t sleep with her thumb in her mouth often, only when she needed comfort, and I had to wonder if she had heard us talking, even in her sleep, and become distressed. I studied the wards on the room and tightened them here and there where they had grown a bit frayed. And I prayed too. I wasn’t much of a prayer, not like Jane. She was a true believer and she prayed religiously—a small joke we shared. I was less . . . confident, less sanguine, about who and what God was, and about why He would give a rat’s behind about any of us. But I prayed anyway—God, keep my baby safe. Just in case. And oddly, when I finished, Angie pulled her thumb out of her mouth, sighed, and rolled over. Coincidence was a strange mistress. When I settled in my chair and picked up my tea, Jane went on.
“He was accused of having rabies. The kid was,” she clarified. “He bit several people, tried to chew off the arm of a little girl in town. No one got turned, but the kid disappeared and the doctor stopped practicing and went into seclusion. He wasn’t seen by the townspeople often, but when the war started in 1861, he totally disappeared.”