by Faith Hunter
“He stinks,” Carmen said. “A bit like muskrat. Or squirrel. Something rodent-ish.”
“I got wet dog out of the scent,” I said.
“Whatever he is, he’s alive,” Liz said.
“And not evil,” Cia added. “Trapped. The result of a hex.”
“Only a witch could have done a spell that captured a soul with a hex, and a blood witch at that,” Liz said, exasperated. Blood witches spilled blood to power spells. The bigger the spell, the more blood needed. Human sacrifice had been known to be involved in black-magic ceremonies.
As we talked, I passed out plates, butter, and the peach hot, and topped up our mugs. “It feels like wild magic. Something not planned, but the result of something else. As if the incantation is sparking off all over the place.”
“Why did it come here?” Cia asked.
“Opposites attract?” Carmen asked. “Your house is free and happy and he isn’t?”
“Maybe he thought you could free him?” Liz asked.
“Or the death magics pulled him in against his will,” the human twins said, nearly synchronous, walking into the kitchen together.
“Somebody didn’t call us for the eats. Bad sisters,” Regan said.
Amelia added, “Right. Evil sisters. And anyway, you left out the death-magic possibility. Maybe it’s here to get Molly to do something deadly to it.” No one replied, and I sat frozen in my chair, my hands cupped around my heated mug.
“What?” Amelia asked, her tone belligerent. “Sis, the witches among us were there when your magic turned on the earth.”
“The rest of us saw the garden of death afterward,” Regan added.
“And we all know it’s still dead,” Amelia said. “Doesn’t take a witch to know that nothing will ever grow in that soil again.”
“And then there’s the whole thing about your familiar keeping you in control,” Regan said, the conversation ping-ponging as my world skidded around me.
“And about the music spell Big Evan made to keep your magics under control,” Amelia said. “Not talking about this is stupid. Gives it power.”
Regan said, “My twin is taking her second year of psychology. Pass the cream. Thanks. She’s teacher’s pet because she can add the witch perspective to the psycho stuff.”
Amelia huffed with disgust. “Not psycho stuff. That’s rude to people with emotional or mental disorders or illness.” Regan rolled her eyes and buttered her bread, taking a big bite.
The time my human sisters argued allowed me to settle. “Okay.” The Everharts went still as vamps themselves. Because Amelia was right. It wasn’t something we talked about. Ever. And secrets, things hidden, buried, and left to molder in the dark of one’s soul, did give evil the power to rule. “So,” I said, taking a fortifying gulp of tea. “What do you think about the death magics? Did the teapot come to me to die?”
My sisters all broke into talking at once, suggesting things like meditation and prayer, singing chants, spells to disrupt my death magic, and hinting that we simply bust the teapot and see if that would work to free the trapped soul. At that one, the teapot vanished, and appeared instantly back in hiding in my daughter’s toy box. Liz dubbed it the teleporting teapot. Then the human sisters cleared the table and started research into Lincoln Shaddock’s history, trying to find out about his relationship to witches and the teapot. There was nothing in the standard online databases, but I had an ace in the hole with Jane Yellowrock. She had tons of data on vamps, including Lincoln Shaddock, and she sent it to us, no questions asked. The information she offered confirmed the vamps’ story.
Shaddock had been turned after a battle in the Civil War. When he came through the devoveo, he traveled to find his family. His wife had remarried and moved south. She rejected him. According to the data, there was evidence that she was an untrained, unacknowledged witch, not uncommon in those witch-hating times. There was nothing about a teapot, not that it mattered.
By lunchtime, we had a plan. Of sorts.
• • •
We closed the café and the herb shop at dusk, and rearranged the tables so there was an open place in the middle of the café. All of us, children, witches, and humans, stood in the middle, circled around the toy box with its magical teleporting teapot, held hands, warded the space where we would work, and blessed our family line with the simple words, “Good health and happiness. Protection and safety. Wisdom and knowledge used well and for good. Everharts, ever hearts, together, always.” Then we broke the circle and the human twins piled our children into my car and headed back to my house. We witches? We waited.
Seven Sassy Sisters’ was decorated in mountain country chic, with scuffed hardwood floors, bundles of herbs hanging against the back brick wall, tables, and several tall-backed booths, seats upholstered with burgundy faux leather and the tables covered with burgundy and navy blue check cloths. The kitchen was visible through a serving window. It was comfortable, a place where families and friends could come and get good wholesome food, herbal teas, fresh bread, rolls, and a healing touch if they wanted it. We also served the best coffee and tea in the area. But it wasn’t the sort of place that vampires, with their fancy-schmancy, hoity-toity attitudes, would ever come. Until they knocked on the door just after dusk.
This time there were four vamps: Holly, his red hair in a ponytail; Jerel; a blond female vamp wearing a fringed leather vest, jeans covered in bling, and cowboy boots; and Lincoln Shaddock. He bore a striking resemblance to the actor in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a beak-nosed frontiersman, but with a clean-shaven chin, tall, rawboned, and rough around the edges. Unlike most vamps, who dressed for effect, Shaddock was wearing dark brown jeans and a T-shirt with a light jacket. And an honest-to-God bolo tie with a gold nugget as the clasp.
I took a steadying breath and unlocked the door, stepping back as they filed in and stood in a semicircle on one side of the toy box. The witches stood ranged on the other side. Holly said, “May I present—”
The outer door slammed open and Angie Baby raced inside, strawberry blond curls streaming and tangled, face flushed and sweaty. She had run from . . . somewhere. She dashed between us, rammed the toy box open, grabbed the teapot, and screamed, “George is mine! He likes me, not you!” And . . . she stuck her tongue out at Lincoln Shaddock, the most important master vamp in the Appalachian Mountains.
We were all frozen, my sisters in horror, me in sudden, blinding fear for my child, Jerel with a sword half-drawn, Holly with a bemused smile on his face, and Shaddock in . . . fury. Utter, encompassing fury. His pale skin flushed with blood, his eyes vamping-out, the pupils widening, white sclera flaming scarlet as the capillaries dilated. And his fangs clicked down from the roof of his mouth, the snap the only sound in the dead-silent room. Then everything happened at once.
Lincoln pointed a long, bony finger at Angie and took a single step toward her.
Moving faster than I could follow, Jerel drew his sword with a soft hiss of steel on leather. Holly stepped toward Angie Baby. Both vamps put themselves between my daughter and the enraged vampire. Jerel pointed his sword at his master’s throat. Holly maneuvered, bare-handed, his feet rooted and knees bent, clearly much more dangerous than he appeared—a martial art master of some form or other. Or several. Bladed. That was what Jane called it. His body was bladed. He was primed to attack his boss.
Lincoln slowed but shouted, “Witches deal falsely! We will have our property!”
“Children are sacrosanct, my lord,” Jerel said softly.
“It would pain us to bring you harm,” Holly said, his red ponytail swinging.
“I am not ready to become the MOC, just yet, honey, but if you hurt that young ’un, I’ll let ’em take your head,” the blonde said, which identified her as the heir apparent of the Shaddock Clan, Dacy Mooney. And she too stepped between the vamp and the rest of us. I remembered to breathe and reached for Angie,
pulling her close enough for Carmen to activate the ward we had prepared. It closed us in and closed the vamps out. “Take a good cleansing breath, Link,” Dacy said. “Relax. Or it will be the last time you lose your temper.”
Outside, my van squealed into the lot and stopped hard. The twins bailed out before the vehicle even stopped rocking, one holding two handguns, the other with a shotgun. “Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed softly.
“I’m not here as the blood-master of my clan,” Lincoln Shaddock said with a strong Tennessee/Kentucky accent. “I’m here to regain what I lost.”
“We all want to regain what we lost when our humanity left us,” Dacy said, “but we got rules and limits. And memories. That has to be enough,” she finished, her tone telling how much she had lost and how painful memories could be.
“Children. Are. Sacrosanct,” Jerel said, his tone adamant, light glinting off the steel of his long sword.
The twins moved into the room and positioned themselves so they could shoot Shaddock and not one of us. Holly shifted so he could get to Regan and Shaddock both. His face was intent, focused, and troubled. He would kill if he had to. But he clearly didn’t want to.
Lincoln blinked and looked at my daughter, cradling a reddish and yellow teapot like a pet. His fangs clicked back into his mouth. His eyes paled and lightened, as did his skin. And he blew out a puff of breath as if he really needed to breathe for something other than talking. He looked up to me. “My apologies, ladies. I am . . . not myself tonight, I haven’t been myself ever since I felt the burst of magic. I raced to see if . . .” He paused and shook his head as if changing what he had been about to say. “But it was only the teapot. But the teapot was better than nothing. Better than the nothing that I had. I ask your forgiveness.”
And then he did the strangest thing. The fiercest fanghead in the hills dropped to one knee. The three defending vampires stepped slightly to the side so Lincoln could see us, but not so far that he could get to us if he still wanted. He said to Angie Baby, “I especially beg your forgiveness, little witch child. I was distraught and forgot how frightening my kind can be.”
“George is scared of you,” Angie said.
Lincoln smiled, a purely human smile, and said, “No. The dog was named George, not the teapot.”
Angie narrowed her eyes fiercely. “What kind of dog?”
Lincoln’s smile widened. “A basset hound. He was my best, my very best, dog. Ever. I gave him into my Dorothy’s keeping before I went off to war. He was ancient and toothless and fierce in protecting her when I appeared that night. Until he caught my scent. There must have been something still of the human scent about me. For he came to me when my Dorothy would not.”
“Bassets weren’t imported to the U.S. until the late eighteen hundreds,” Regan said, her shotgun broken open and resting on a table, her eyes on her tablet.
“Incorrect,” Shaddock said, as if a discussion about basset hounds were the purpose of this gathering. As if he hadn’t just threatened my baby. “George Washington himself received a pair of bassets from Lafayette.”
“Huh. Yeah. You’re right. Legend, unsupported.”
“Truth,” Lincoln said.
I asked, “What did you hope when you felt the magic last night?”
Shaddock shook his head slowly, in sorrow. “The foolish dreams of an old man. When my Dorothy rejected me, she threw out a . . . It was as if I was hit with a bolt of lightning. I never saw the like, not before, not after. When I came to, my wife was gone, along with the teapot she had been holding, and the old dog. Gone and never returned, never seen again. Last evening, I felt the same jolt of power, of lightning, and I ran to the old log cabin, hoping . . . hoping foolishly.” He shook his head. “Hoping that my Dorothy had come back to me. Somehow.”
Dacy Mooney said, “By all that’s holy. That’s why you kept that old cabin? Hoping your wife would come back?”
“’Tis so, Dacy. Foolish. I know. Foolish,” he shook his head. “She returned to her husband. She lived on until her natural death.”
“Had you been bleeding when you woke from your wife’s”—temper tantrum wouldn’t work—“anger?” I asked.
“Yes. I had healed, but I could still smell my blood, going sweet and rancid on the air. How did you know?”
Because wild magic did this. And wild magic is even stronger with blood, I thought, though I didn’t share this with Shaddock. Carefully, feeling my way, I said, “There is a spirit trapped in this teapot. It isn’t human. It’s possible, maybe, that the dog’s soul is stuck in the teapot and it is tied to your blood.”
“George doesn’t like you,” Angie Baby said. “Weeell, he likes you, but he’s mad at you.” Her eyes went wide. “He’s pooping on your pillow!”
Lincoln dropped to the floor, sitting on a level with my baby, eye to eye, on the far side of the ward. He looked awestruck, if vamps could look struck with awe. “I went away for a week,” he said, “to do business in town, to register to fight in a war I never wanted. George was but a few months old. When I returned he raced to our marriage bed and he . . .” Lincoln’s smile went wide. “He defecated on my pillow.” Lincoln’s eyes rested on the teapot in Angie’s arms. “Oh my God. It’s George.” He held out his hands, beseeching. “I never wanted to leave you. Never. War was never my desire.”
Angie scowled so hard she looked like that Celtic warrior, fierce and unyielding. My baby was going to grow up . . . a warrior. A true warrior. Pride filled me. I said, “Angie? What do you think?”
Still scowling, Angie walked to the edge of the ward and I quickly dropped it. For all I knew, my powerful child could walk straight to them with no ill effect, but I didn’t want that to get around, if so. Grudgingly she placed the teapot in Lincoln’s outstretched hands and he gathered the reddish and yellow teapot close, stroking it, murmuring, “I am so sorry. I beg your forgiveness. And yours, little witch child. Most earnestly.” To me he said, “I owe you and yours a boon, whatever you may want, at a time of your choosing. If it is within my power to provide, it shall be yours.”
I wasn’t holding my breath for that. “Angie, go to your aunt Regan.” My daughter walked around Lincoln, sitting on the shop floor, cuddling a teapot, and took her aunt’s hand, her face long and woebegone. I was pretty sure Regan hissed a threat to beat her black and blue if she ever jumped out of a moving car again. And then hugged her fiercely. I’d deal with my daughter later. For now, we still had vampires in my family business, and vamps still drank blood. Dangerous, even if they did look cute and defenseless sitting on the floor.
“Ummm,” I said. “We may have a way to free George.” If it really was the spirit of a dog stuck inside the stoneware teapot. “But we need the teapot back for a bit.” Without hesitation, Shaddock placed it on the toy box and took a step back to the tables and chairs that we had placed along the wall. Holly pulled out a chair and Link sat, his eyes never leaving the teapot.
It was a wild magic spell, somehow tied to Shaddock, for him to have felt the reappearance after so many years. I didn’t ask where the teapot had been, but I had a bad feeling that Dorothy’s wild magic had knocked it out of its own timeline and into the future a century and a half or so. The four of us witches stood at the four cardinal points, circled around the toy box, hands clasped. As eldest, I took north, even with my magic so damaged and me having to rein in my death magics beneath fierce will.
Together we said the words to an old family spell, softly chanting. The wyrd spell was originally meant to heal that which had been wounded by black magic. “Cneasaigh, cneasaigh a bháis ar maos in fhuil,” we said together. The rough translation, from Irish Gaelic: “Heal, heal, that which is soaked in blood.”
We chanted the words over and over as our power rose. And rose. I closed my eyes, feeling my sisters’ magic flow through me and through the floor, into the earth. Fecund and rich and potent. Power. Life. And whe
n our massed magics were meshed and full, we directed the working, like a pin, a pick, an awl, directly at the teapot.
It shattered.
Pieces flew through the air, and beyond the circle, breaking it. The power that we had been using blazed up and out in a poof of heated air and broken stoneware. We ducked. Shattered pottery crashed into the floor and walls. And into Lincoln Shaddock’s bony knees.
The vamps reacted faster than I could see, racing at us, weapons to hand. Ready to kill.
“George!” Angie Baby shouted, and broke free from a dumbfounded Regan to throw herself at the multicolored, long-eared dog standing on the toy box. He licked her face and nuzzled her. And then he turned to stare at Lincoln. He sniffed, smelling, tasting the air, redolent with the ozone of burned power and vampire blood.
“Son of a witch,” Carmen muttered. “It worked.”
George slowly dropped his front paws off the box and waddled to his old master, to Lincoln, licking the trace of blood off Lincoln’s bleeding knees.
“Son of a witch,” Carmen muttered again. “It really worked.”
Lincoln Shaddock dropped again to the floor and pulled George into his arms. He was crying, purely human tears, and the old dog licked them from his cheeks. Lincoln chuckled and rubbed the basset behind the ears. “You are a sight for sore eyes, you are, old boy. Good old boy. Good George.”
It was the first major working we had done as a family since we’d lost our coven leader and big sister. Tears fell down my face in joy and delight and excitement. My earth magics weren’t what they had been before. But they weren’t dead. Not yet.
• • •
One week later to the day, there came a knock on the wards. Holly and Jerel stood there, in the dusky night, waiting patiently. Carrying KitKit, I went to the front door and dropped the wards. When the vamps reached the porch, Jerel bowed again, stiffly formal, and opened a folded note. Vamps have great night vision, and when he read, I had no doubt he could see the words.