by Gina Whitney
Nick was behind her. But Catherine’s newly enhanced magic allowed her to cast a most powerful invisibility spell over him and Tamara. It was so powerful that not even Addison could detect him. As she walked through the darkness, his body materialized. With his powerful hand, he grabbed her from behind, and with a clean, swift swipe, slit her throat from ear to ear. He let her body slide down his as her blood squirted onto the wall. Not wanting to let fresh meat go to waste, Nick ate some of her.
Aunt Evelyn was awakened by Addison’s body hitting the floor. “What in the world?” She put on her robe and slippers and went to investigate. In the hall she listened hard for more noise. She noticed that with every step she took, there was another one that echoed it. And it didn’t belong to her. Aunt Evelyn turned around with magic hands ready to go. However, there was only darkness behind her. She turned back around and ran right into Tamara and a baseball bat. The bat immediately struck Aunt Evelyn in the head, cracking her skull and knocking her out.
Julie startled out of sleep. Her internal alarm screamed that Grace’s life was about to be in danger. She jumped up and transformed into the shape-shifter. But what could she do? Grace was so far away.
Then Nick jumped out of the darkness and pounced on Julie. Their bumping around woke up James. Without even thinking he ran up the stairs as if he had never been asleep. He jumped into the fight, with Tamara joining in too.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, I was snooping around Eternity Hill. I was determined to find Gem’s phone. I snuck into the den—with my wand, just in case something went down. It was so dark I had to wipe the walls looking for a light switch. But I could not find one. I felt my way to the middle of the room, bumping into all the furniture in my path.
I found a lamp and twisted on the switch. “Okay, if I were Gem, where would I keep my phone?”
Gem was such a strange character, though, it seemed that a logical line of thinking would not work. I walked along the walls and finally saw a white telephone cord. “Bingo!” I rushed over and followed the cord all the way to its plug. Of course there was no phone at the end of it…just another dead end.
Exasperated, I leaned against a wall panel and accidently fell through. A gush of cold wind chilled my skin. I had stumbled into a hidden chamber.
I thought, You know you really shouldn’t go in there. But since when did I take anyone’s advice, including my own? I stepped inside a black, candlelit corridor. The deeper I went, the more it smelled like the spray of a skunk. I covered my nose as I made my way to a door. My intuition said, “Go back! Go back now. Pretend you didn’t see any of this.”
“Shut up,” I told my inner voice.
I opened the door and went in a few steps. I didn’t get too far before I saw the preserved bodies of those rumored missing witches who’d had dealings with the Three Sisters before. I ran backward out of the chamber in horror. Stunned and disoriented, I stumbled onto what appeared to be a burial chamber. In it stood a solitary coffin, and something was moving in it. I looked above the coffin and saw another painting—one of William Blake’s Paradise Lost illustrations. And it hit me. Lucifer was in that coffin.
“Daddy posed for that personally,” Gem said as she came up behind me. The other two sisters followed her.
“Who are you?” I asked. My wand was ready to go.
Clea said, “I told you she was slow on the uptake. Our father is Lucifer, and we are his fallen angels.”
“Daddy was sentenced to one thousand years in prison for asserting his individuality and giving humans choices. What’s so bad about that?” Sarine said.
I realized that the entire house was the prison, Lucifer was trapped in that coffin, and that smell was not a skunk, but brimstone.
Gem approached me like a buddy. “Grace, we know a heavy burden has been put upon you. It need not be that way. You really don’t want to fight Catherine. You want to be free—free of a destiny not of your choosing. You want a life with no pain. No suffering. No sorrow. Bliss… It can be yours right now. We can give it to you. Let us give it to you. All you have to do is make a choice.”
I did want bliss. I did want to be free. And I found myself tempted.
Sarine came over and spoke too. “Even though Daddy is in jail, this is still his world. The humans always choose him. We influence them through food, drugs, sex, war, politics, but mostly through music.”
“Daddy is the Prince of the Air,” Clea added. “The airwaves, that is. You can embed the air with anything you want. The human mind is extremely malleable, but rarely in the direction that benefits all. Really, humans have never wanted to be good. They like being bad.”
Gem spoke again. “When you opened that puzzle cube and rescued the key to get Daddy out, we knew you’d be an excellent addition to our team. Join us, and you can have everything. See, we can’t use the key ourselves. It won’t open the lock for us. We need you to do it.”
“And if I don’t?” I said, getting my right mind back.
“You did come for something. We ascertained that it must be the plant. Well, we just won’t give it to you. Plus, we can’t let you leave knowing our secret. Remember, there is a trade. Either join us, or lose your mind or your life.”
“I won’t be one of you, and I don’t choose either of the other options,” I said. Then, in a flash, I whipped out my wand and hit each sister with a blaze of fire. I grabbed the key and ran out of that pit, straight into the hall. As I looked at the paintings, I understood the story they told was of Lucifer’s fall in the Book of Revelation.
The Three Sisters put the fires out and transformed into human-like jackals with wings, and flew after me. I knew I had to get two things: the plant and the limo’s keys. I booked it through that labyrinth of a house. I took my chances on getting pricked with the plant as I grabbed as much as I could. I must’ve done it right, because I didn’t get so much as a scratch.
I finally made it to the garage, where three stretch limos were stored. I grabbed a set of keys and tried the first car. No go. I could hear the jackals tearing up the house and screaming like banshees as they looked for me. I tried to calm myself as I put the key in the lock of car number two. That didn’t work either. And the shrieking of the Three Sisters was getting closer.
Car number three was my last hope. “Oh, God, please let it work,” I begged. I put the key in the lock, and it turned. I opened the door and tossed in my wand and the plant. I put the key in the ignition and turned on the car. There was no time to let up the garage door, so I put the limo in reverse and floored it. The door shattered into a million pieces as the car screeched out of it. I put the gear in “D” and burned rubber down the driveway.
The jackals flew out of the obliterated garage door and caught up with me. With large talons, they ripped metal off the car’s frame. One of the jackals flew right next to the driver’sside window. She kept ramming it with her massive body. The window cracked, and I nearly rolled over as the limo careened down the canyon hill.
I was now out of Holmby Hills and on a main road. Because it was the middle of the night on a weekday, there was—thankfully—no traffic. I glanced down at the speedometer—eighty-two on a city street. And I sure as hell didn’t bother with red lights.
The jackals then started to tear at the tires. I made a sharp turn to shake them off, and only succeeded in tilting the limo on two wheels. After it fell back onto all fours, one tire blew out, and I briefly lost control, swerving onto the sidewalk. I took out a mailbox and a newspaper container.
After a considerable distance, one of the jackals finally pulled the rest of the roof off the car, which meant the limo had lost most of its body. She grabbed my shoulders with her claws and was about to pull me out of the speeding car like an eagle capturing its prey. That was until the car crossed out of the Los Angeles city limits. The jackals bounced backward like they had flown into an unseen wall. I braked hard and looked back.
The sister-jackals were squealing and trying to break some sort of force field th
ey could not cross. I took the opportunity to escape, and drove away as quickly as I could in that wreck of a car.
After a few miles, the three-tired limo sputtered out on me. I pulled over, hoping the Three Sisters hadn’t escaped their boundary. I tried to call home, and again I couldn’t get through.
I got out of the car and looked for a safe place to spend the night. This was no easy task, because I had apparently ended up on Skid Row. I had no ID or even cash for an hourly rate motel, so I had to make due in an abandoned tunnel. Using my nose, I searched for a spot that wasn’t saturated in piss or diarrhea. I found a discarded paper bag and wrapped the plant, making sure the pricks didn’t stick me. I set it behind me, and after keeping watch for a couple of hours, I fell asleep.
The next morning I woke up with a homeless guy sleeping on my lap. I pushed the sewer-smelling man off me.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” he said as if I had fucked up. I checked for my wand; it was still hidden in my waistband. He had better be glad too, I thought.
I walked out of the tunnel, blocking my eyes from the intense morning light, and climbed up to the street. With the plant in one hand, I hitchhiked with the other. After a few motorists stopped to ask how much I was selling my flowers for, a semi stopped for me. The truck driver was a middle-aged woman with a Buddha belly.
“Hey, I’m Nellie. Where you headed?” she asked cheerfully.
“East…to New York.”
“I’m not going to New York, but I am headed east. You can go as far as I can take you.”
“Sounds good.”
I hopped into the truck and felt oddly calm with Nellie. “Do I know you?” I asked.
“No, but I know you. I’m a witch.”
I backed up. James had told me that all witches, good and bad, wanted to kill me.
Nellie laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. I always thought Ilan was right with what she had done. I never thought I’d be picking up a legend like you. Not in my lifetime.” She looked at me. “You look like you’ve been in a fight.”
“I have. Ever heard of the Three Sisters?”
Nellie shuddered. “Yup. No one ever gets away from them. You must be very lucky.”
“Yeah, I guess. They were chasing me, but something stopped them, like they got stuck behind a wall.”
“I drive this route all the time, and from what I can gather, they are confined to the limits of Los Angeles. I don’t know why. Maybe another witch can answer that. I dropped out of the witch life a while back. Too much for my nerves. I live a low-profile, mortal life now. Start talking witch stuff and bad things start to happen.”
I took that as my cue to stop talking about the Three Sisters. As I watched Nellie handle the big rig, it dawned on me why Mother had sent me to LA. I had to get the plant. But, more importantly, I had to learn independence. I would need to have confidence in my own skill if I were to defeat Catherine.
A car passed by, and a little boy in the backseat gave Nellie the “honk the horn” gesture. She gladly pulled the chain, and the horn blared. We were now far away from Los Angeles—the city of angels.
However, no one ever specified what kind of angels they were.
Chapter Twenty-Six
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
—Reinhold Niebuhr
I was on the last leg of my hitchhiking trek across the country, and my current driver was Mandy. Though I deeply appreciated the ride, I was not enthused over the suffocating vapors emanating from her three-to-a-pack, strawberry-scented air freshener. I watched it dangle off the rearview mirror and wondered why a strawberry air freshener was shaped like a leaf.
“I hate to be nosy, but you never said why you’re hitchhiking,” Mandy said, bobbing her head to some Maroon 5. She had been asking me in roundabout ways about how I’d ended up on Interstate 80, in the middle of nowhere, with my thumb in the air.
“It’s a long story. You wouldn’t be interested,” I said, trying to tune her out.
“We’ve got at least two more hours to go. Plenty of time for you to spill your secrets.” She followed that up with an involuntary, bizarre laugh that sounded like a giant tortoise having sex.
And I totally got why Mandy was trying so hard to engage me. She was an extremely lonely girl who’d do anything for any sort of human contact. I figured she must have had a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, judging from the way her mouth twitched. She also had to keep an industrial-sized jar of cream in the car for her psoriasis, which left her with large, silvery-white patches all over her body—particularly on her hands. Ever since she’d picked me up on the outskirts of Chicago, I’d been forced to slather the gloppy cream on her exposed areas. That way we wouldn’t have to waste time pulling over so she could do it herself. Gross.
I sat there, still trying to wipe that greasy shit onto my dirty pants. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mandy looking back and forth between the road and me.
“Well?” she asked.
Once again I answered obliquely about my life situation.
And once again Mandy wasn’t satisfied, and wanted to probe even deeper. “Maybe you’ll feel more open if I tell you about me?”
Aw, Goddamn. Mandy had already told me about herself… the same story four dozen times. Here was the abbreviated rundown: She was an only child, an accidental conception for parents who had never wanted kids in the first place. And they let her know it. She’d never had a boyfriend, and channeled all her energy into her schoolwork, which had allowed her to graduate high school and college early. She’d driven to Chicago for an internship, but they’d thought she was not enough of a people person and sent her back home. And she’d even had the nerve to throw in a few catty comments about my needing a shower. Mind you, I had been hitchhiking for the past three days. Now, was there any more to Mandy? I don’t think so. However, if she unzipped her pants and pulled out a surprise dick… Now that would have been something to talk about.
Under different circumstances I would have felt guilty about my malicious thoughts. But I knew Mandy’s picking me up was not an entirely charitable gesture. She believed her supposed act of generosity toward me would pay off in a reciprocal relationship. She was so desperate for companionship she’d go oven shopping with Gil Valle as long as he promised to call later.
So, after fifty years—I mean two hours, Mandy and I finally arrived in Massapequa. I gave her directions to the main road adjacent to Aunt Evelyn’s driveway. No way was I letting Mandy come near the actual house.
“You know, I don’t live too far away from here. I can come by anytime and hang out,” she said.
I looked at the nonexistent watch on my wrist. “Ooh, it’s getting late. You’d better hurry and drop me off so you can get to your house…like really fast. You don’t even have to stop the car. I’ll jump out.”
Mandy let out that atrocious laugh again. “Grace, you’re so funny.”
“Yeah, heh heh.”
Mandy did deliver me to my destination—the entrance of Aunt Evelyn’s driveway. To my chagrin she stopped the car to let me out instead of keeping it moving as I’d suggested. This led to an uncomfortable goodbye.
“You actually live here? I heard about this place. Supposed to be real witchy,” Mandy said, scoping out the property.
At first I thought Mandy had outed me. But I looked at her clueless face and realized she was still none the wiser. However, she reached into her console and pulled out an anti-Halloween booklet from her church. It was titled Exodus 22:18. She handed it to me.
“We just had them printed up and will be distributing them in October,” Mandy said.
I skimmed through the booklet. The narrative and scary pictures featured a defiant little girl who decided to go trickor-treating and ended up in hell instead.
“Gee, thanks for the gift. You shouldn’t have. Really,” I said.
�
��I’ve got an idea. You can tag along with me as I hand them out. It’s easy. Just put them under windshield wipers.”
I hopped out of that car in one seamless sweep. “Gotta go.”
“Hey, give me your phone number.”
“I don’t mean to be cold, but no,” I said while blocking out her clinging-crab energy.
“But I gave you a ride,” Mandy protested.
The last thing I needed was a zealous stalker with a girl crush. Plus her associating with me would put her life in peril, and I did not want to be held accountable for that. My response had to be swift, leaving nothing to misconstrue. I had to be cruel to be kind.
“Mandy, let me make myself perfectly clear. I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful pal for someone else. But you and me? It ain’t gonna happen. We don’t have anything in common, and, quite frankly, I can’t even stand to hear you breathe. You have as much chance of being my buddy as an apple has of turning into an orange. Therefore, disappear.”
Mandy didn’t get it. Filled with delusional, codependent hope, she said, “But with grafting and gene splicing, an apple can become an orange.”
A slow, inarticulate groan slipped out of me, and I turned my back on her. However, she didn’t drive off, and was still making plans for our future together. “I’ll see you later,” she said cheerily.
Mandy was becoming a ridiculous memory as I scampered toward my reunion with James. Abstinence was not my friend, and my body had been craving his touch ever since I’d left.
Aside from hearing Mandy’s car creep away, I was glad to be back in the stillness and solitude of the country. And I was amazed that the plant was still as fresh and vibrant as it had been when I’d stole it from the Three Sisters.
I traipsed down the driveway, relishing the utter peace and quiet. But as I got closer to Aunt Evelyn’s house, I was struck by how something was off—way off. Everything was too quiet. No squawking birds. No chirping insects. Not even the rustling of the wind. I walked faster and arrived at the mailbox. Its lid was wide open from the eruption of envelopes stuffed inside.