I knew Exit was nervous, and now, so was I.
Chapter Ten: By A Thread
I nattered away to keep Exit’s mind as busy as I could, given his current state. The walk to my home was cold and dark, but lit by a blaze of stars that were pushed back from the silver moon that had risen near vertical overhead. I smelled snow on the breeze and knew that before dawn we would have, at the minimum, a fresh dusting to remake the world once again.
Before I could put one boot on my porch, the first few notes of Liebestraum spilled forth from my pocket. Franz Liszt was Brendan’s favorite composer, and his ringtone caught Exit’s attention immediately. As I tapped my phone, Exit smiled with gentle amazement yet again.
“Hey, what’s up? It hasn’t been very long.” I knew this could go one of two ways, but a strange feeling accompanied his call. Brendan’s a good researcher, but my witchmark is better at detecting danger. There was a low hum in by body that began the second I connected the call.
Brendan exhaled with frustration. “There isn’t any sense wasting time. She doesn’t exist.”
“What?” I asked, incredulous. I cut my eyes at Exit, who was attentive but not eavesdropping.
“Reina Isobella Wainwright does not exist, has never existed, and is, for lack of a better term, a black hole. A void. Her husband is real; I looked around for him and found traces of his life and family with ease. As to his bride, there’s a glaring omission of her in every single record I could find. Even her parents are virtual ghosts.” Brendan sighed again with disgust.
I chose my words carefully since Exit was four feet away. “Is there any, ah, disinformation?”
“Funny you choose that word. I don’t think her invisibility is an accident. I think she’s real.” Brendan’s voice rang with confidence.
“Okay, so if we can’t see her, then what happened?” Exit stiffened at this, but I patted the air with one hand, telling him to keep it together. Brendan wasn’t done.
“I said she was a black hole, not a myth. I think she’s been wiped by somebody at a level that’s well beyond anything I could do by hiring one of those online reputation companies. There isn’t even any mention of the mission where her parents worked for fifteen years; it’s as if someone came at her family from multiple angles, deleting any evidence that she’d ever lived. I can’t imagine why if she was the wife of a mining engineer. It’s not as if he was involved in the Manhattan Project or building a secret death ray. He dug holes, right?” Brendan asked.
“He did, all over the world, but still.” I felt heat rise in my cheeks. I was getting angry being blocked by something I could neither fight nor confront. It felt slimy even at a distance. “Thanks for now. If you turn anything up—”
“I’ll call. You bet, Carlie. Take care.” He ended the call, leaving me staring at the dim glow of my phone. I turned to see Exit facing away from me, his shoulders shaking as he cried in that quiet way that big men do when they feel shame at losing control. His shoulders danced with a pain that was bone deep and spanned the love of a century. I went to him, arms out, before I could even think of anything to say. He was collapsing like a forgotten barn that is past it’s time, and it hurt to even watch.
“She is gone to me, and I don’t know why.” Each word was punctuated with an angry breath as he wrestled with control. Even in the moonlight, I could see his cheeks were aflame with embarrassed pain. He reached one big hand into his coarse workman’s pants and withdrew a piece of silk so delicate it looked as if it were spun from a memory. Holding it to his lips, he nodded with a grit that I’d seen before when people came to terms with death, or loss, or something even worse: irrelevance.
“What is that?” I asked, my words buoyed with something at the edge of my mind.
“Her hair ribbon. It is all I have left.” His sentence fell with the gloom of a closing coffin, but my heart fairly rang with excitement.
“May—may I see it? I’ll be careful, I swear it.” I sounded giddy and hoped he took no offense.
“Yes, but why? It’s—”
Before he could finish his thought, I held the small ribbon skyward to let it bathe in the moonlight. It was close to cornflower blue, with delicate yellow flowers embroidered within a pattern that was both archaic and familiar. I peered close, holding the ribbon even higher aloft as my eyes strained to see, and there it was, dancing in the last vestiges of the evening’s breeze.
A hair.
Long, black as coal, and gleaming, it drifted about until I pinched it between my forefinger and thumb with the delicacy of a surgeon. A hair. Her hair. We could find her. There was nowhere on this world that my magic could not take us, and I let a prayer drift upward to the stars and moon as I wrapped Reina’s last presence around my thumb.
“What is it, Carlie?” His voice brimmed with hope. He could see my smile gleaming in the night.
“I told you I’m a witch, right?”
“Of course,” he said, but it was drawled just enough that I could tell there was wiggle room in his belief.
“Well, tonight you’re going to see what a witch can do, firsthand. I’ve only taken one other person outside my family into the place where I use my magic. Tonight, you’ll be the second.” I opened the door and stepped through like I carried a live hand grenade. I didn’t want anything happening to the hair. It was long, whole, and perfect. I could cast a spell of incredible power using it, and my mind was already racing with possibilities. My witchmark tingled to the point of distraction. There was magic building, and my body reacted to it like an oncoming storm front.
Gus regarded our return with a flash of joy, quickly covered by a deep chested marrrroowwwwwt of protest at the shocking lack of tuna in his life. Making my excuses to Exit, who stood mildly confused at my haste, I opened a can, spread it carefully in his bowl, and watched the beast begin to eat with a single-minded will that was admirable.
“He’s good. And I’m going to make tea and begin preparing a few things. Care for a cup?” I was already in that state of bustle that arrives with a clear decision and magical path waiting for my attention. I could already feel what was going to happen to the hair, now curled under a glass turned upside down on my kitchen counter.
“Tea would be wonderful. It really is nicely warm in here.” He looked around thankfully at my home, then took a seat as I began to put together a tray of what must have looked like wholly random items.
“I have a woodstove there, of course.” I eyed the potbelly stove ticking away nearby. “And an electric unit for when things get really dicey. The house is old, but well kept. It was my parents’.” Water began to steam on my range, so I found two heavy mugs and dropped custom tea mixes in both. There was peppermint, and lemon, and a bit of black pekoe, all blended together to bring focus to our minds—or mine, at the very least.
“Are they still, ah, nearby?” he asked with great diplomacy.
I laughed. It was a delicate topic for a man who had missed a century, and he handled it well. “They’re quite well, but not here. They live in New Mexico.”
“Ahh, the brand new addition to our union. It was quite a nice place, I’m told. I would have made my way there sooner or later, I’m sure.”
“Why?” I asked, curious. New Mexico was a long way to go in 1916, no matter what the reason.
“The silver. Or rather, the silver mines. There was incredible haste when the rush overtook much of the western lands. I think that mines once regarded as played out may yet have secrets.” His eyes twinkled with professional glee at the prospect of hidden opportunities. In that second, he looked younger. It suited him far better than the lines of exhaustion engraved on his face.
“You’ll be happy to know that there are booming industries doing just that. Your instincts were correct.” I handed him his tea, careful not to tip the mug. “There are even tours of the ghost towns that litter the landscape. It’s become something of a cottage industry to take visitors through the slumping buildings and scare their pants off with stori
es about the moaning spirits of long-dead miners or their ladies.”
He laughed outright at that. In Exit’s mind, those towns were likely still populated. The long, slow descent into irrelevance may have begun a century earlier, but it had taken some time to complete. His face fell once more as he contemplated the weight of time and its effects on his life.
“Is there truth to them? The stories?” His words seemed wary and probing. It was logical, given my claim to being a witch. He hadn’t seen anything yet, other than a small woman making tea. While delicious, it wasn’t exactly magic, unless you were having caffeine withdrawal. Then it would be pure sorcery.
“I don’t know for certain, but if I were to bet on it? Yes. A resounding yes, and I’d be shocked if there weren’t an array of spirits dating back into history. Ghosts are quite real, I can assure you.” I nodded over my mug with what I hoped was a scholarly air.
“I’d be a fool to think otherwise at this point, and my own experiences tell me that there may be something beyond my own understanding.” His expression was vaguely sour.
“Where?” I asked.
“Where what?” He averted his eyes for a moment, before looking back at me blandly.
I sighed. I hate guessing games. “Where did you see the ghost? It’s obvious, and now you’re trying to avoid it because you think I’ll brand you some kind of crackpot. Umm—I’m not sort of a witch; I’m all witch, with a dash of short order cook thrown in.”
“Is that a reference to your height? Do people hire based on such things? It was commonplace in mines, years ago, but—”
“Ha. And I do mean, ha.” I narrowed my eyes to let him know that despite his relative status as a guest, I wouldn’t be trolled with short jokes just before casting magic. It could upset my flow, and I was having none of it. Plus, it was a really sly joke, and I handed it to him on a platter. Bad Carlie. “I mean that it would be a bit hypocritical of me not to listen to something you might find unusual. For me, this stuff is my bread and butter. See? It’s possible to use cooking metaphors that aren’t insulting.”
“Fair enough.” He grinned, then lapsed into a contemplative silence, broken only when he pointed to the east. “I was in a flooded shaft, looking for a way to drain it. We’d found good copper, but no means to get past what I later found to be an underground stream. I was alone, soaked, and chilled. The air grew colder, and I swore that a woman’s hand reached out of the water to pull me in. It was only an instant, but I dropped my lantern out of shock.”
“Were you in the dark?” It was our most primordial fear. I was creeped out, and it had happened to him, not me, and more than a century earlier.
“Yes. I felt someone, and began to strike another wick to gain light again. My hands were shaking so badly that I was nearly paralyzed with fear before one of the matches caught and threw a flickering light into the shaft. I smelled her before I saw her.” He grinned again, and this time there was amazement there. “I would swear to you that I stood at someone’s hearth. There was the smell of flour, and sizzling fat, and beer all around me. She was small, a woman on the edge of her prime. Her clothes were like that of a pilgrim, or a settler from the early colonies, I think. She smiled at me, and I think that there was loneliness there, but then the lantern caught and I realized that as the light grew, she faded. She was translucent. And I thought I’d gone mad.” He waved helplessly to indicate his confusion.
I could only imagine how he’d recovered from that kind of brush with the Everafter, all while in a sunken mine shaft with tons of earth overhead. I adjusted my judgment of his ability to remain cool under pressure before speaking.
“There are so many things on the cusp of being seen, even for someone like me. It’s a big world, but there are layers, like a cake. Some of them? Easy to see for a witch. Others are like a whisper at the limits of my hearing. Having a family steeped in magic helps. So does Gus.”
“Your cat? How? He is intelligent?” Exit looked frankly shocked.
“Within a limited scope. He’s certainly more attuned to me than a regular house cat, but as to having conversations with him about the nature of our magical world, no. We don’t do such things. He acts as a sort of focus, or a lens for my power. He brings me calm and a central stillness to my spirit that I can’t live without. You’ll see it shortly,” I told him.
“How?” His eyes burned with interest now. I could feel the magic building as my will began to awaken; it was always simmering like a forgotten pot of coffee. Simply discussing spells acted as a catalyst for my power.
“In the cellar. I’m going to cast a basic spell in a powerful manner, and with it we’re going to find your wife.” I looked at him pointedly. “You understand, we can stop at any time, but once you know, there’s nothing I can do to free you from the burden of truth?”
“I want to know.” He pursed his lips, then elaborated. “I must know.”
That was good enough for me. We were ready, willing, and able.
Moments later, Exit looked around the dusty order of my cellar. It was my inner sanctum, with scents of age and secrets hanging in the damp air. My house was old, and the cellar was even older, I thought. The hard-packed dirt floor was silent to walk across, and hemmed in by stone walls that bowed ever so slightly as they yielded to the inevitable pull of the earth. A sturdy wooden chair rested underneath one of two narrow horizontal windows, and with a nod of my chin, Exit took up his position there in complete silence. He knew something unusual was about to unfold before him, so he settled quickly and began to watch me as I moved along my heavy wooden workbench with swift, economical motions.
I’d been down here hundreds of times. Just like my grill at the diner, this was my place of business. I placed the hair on a small, circular piece of raw, white silk, then set to work. The hum of power began to build, as if we were approaching electrical wires running at full capacity. I selected three things to accompany the hair and silk. My main concern wasn’t finding Reina, it was giving my spell the ability to navigate over and through anything that might stand in the way. With that in mind, I placed the silk on the floor, then swept outward over the smooth dirt with my fingers to create a sunburst of small lines. I let the fine granite dust slip from my hand to form a ring around the hair, then took a small, hard-packed bit of snow from the sill upstairs and let it melt naturally, using only my body heat. It took several minutes, and each time a bulging drop of pure water formed at the edge of my hand, I tipped it, letting the moisture patter into the ring of dust with a barely audible pffft.
The final ingredient was a spray of fragrant pine needles, drawn from the bough of a massive tree that had toppled during a storm the previous summer. I placed each needle pointing inward, like the degrees of a compass, until the circle was complete and the hair began to suffuse with a soft, barely-visible light of the palest blue.
I heard Exit’s intake of breath as he watched the wonder of my spell unfold before him. To an engineer, it may has well have been a fire-breathing dragon. A smile pulled at my lips before I refocused my mind into something like a gem of purest will. I was pushing hard against the elements within my little ring as whispers of archaic Gaelic filled the air to brimming with mystery and promise.
And then, in a wondrous swirl of blue and gold, the circle collapsed to form a needle of golden metal that pulsed cheerfully from within. Sweat dripped from the end of my nose, and I let a long, ragged breath out through my teeth. It was done.
Exit spoke first. “Even in a fevered dream, I have never imagined that such things were possible.”
I smiled, wan but happy. It would take a moment to break the channel of magic. Until then, my power continued to scatter in small amounts like a slow leak that cannot be found. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but you get the picture. Here, take this, you’ll need it. Hold out your hand, palm up.”
He did so without hesitation. I dropped the needle from a few inches above his broad, calloused palm, and it didn’t fall. It floated downward
like a feather to rest just above his hand. The sheer joy on his face was transformative. “Why, it can fly!”
In spite of myself, my smile grew broader. “In a sense. It is your North Star. We follow it to your wife, no matter what mountains or water may stand between us.”
He peered closely at the heavy needle. It was three inches long, and thick, like something a sailor might use to stich a wayward flap of heavy sail. The point hovered, twitched, and then pointed decisively in one direction.
I looked at it, then out through the walls and into the park beyond. With a shrug, I stood and dusted off my hands. There was only one thing to do. “I guess we go west.”
He stood, and the needle bobbed slightly before regaining the scent. West. It was decided.
“What’s in that direction? Anything new since I’ve been away?” He was standing, not looking at me. The needle was the only thing connecting him to his world.
“No. There’s nothing there except my . . .” I started, as the realization became clear. I could go anywhere to find his wife, but for one place, and that was where the needle pointed. Fear gripped me before I could master the unwelcome visitor that had taken up residence in the pit of my stomach. A sour taste flooded my tongue, even as bright spots of color bloomed on both cheeks.
I heard myself swallow, a noise of cowardice and shame. “Those are Wulfric’s lands,” I admitted. Then a chill took me, and it wasn’t the damp of the cellar.
Chapter Eleven: Fairy Tale
I did something that’s an absolute rarity for me.
I blew off work. Well, not entirely. I called and arranged for ample coverage, but then, after seeing Exit safely to Gran’s where he would take his rest, I took my own. I rolled up like a burrito in my quilt, waited until Gus positioned himself along my leg, and dropped off into a sleep born of confused fear and exhaustion. I didn’t know what to expect once my eyes were closed, but a little prayer or three couldn’t hurt. This wasn’t the time for sadness and doubt to steal into my dreams.
Halfway Hunted - Halfway Witchy Page 6