by Laura Bickle
“Hello,” I whispered to anyone who might be listening. “I need your help.” That whisper rolled through the field and into the forest, over the creek, and settled down into the earth. Animals with much better hearing than I possessed would hear me. I reached out with my mind, envisioning the shadowy creatures who moved in the dark and the bright ones who fluttered in the day. I needed them. I didn’t know who was out there, but I needed help. I didn’t have any messages in bottles, but I didn’t need them with the animals.
The earth stirred. The forest seethed, and the grasses churned. At first, I thought that might have been some of Celeste’s wind witchery, but this was not that. Shadows roiled and glowing eyes approached, fixed on me.
Hair stood up on the back of my neck as the eyes circled me: deer, coyotes, snakes, mice, opossums, raccoons. A fox wove in the underbrush, while a family of skunks approached. A great horned owl lit on a branch to stare down at me. Bats fluttered overhead, exiting from the top of the barn to swirl above me in a thick, moonlight-dappled cloud.
I exhaled, feeling the animals sighing with me, across this land. I was used to thinking of this land as belonging to the Summerwoods, but it really didn’t; it belonged to the creatures who had been here, who had always been here and who always would.
“Evil people are coming,” I said. “They came here before, centuries before. Their ancestors are buried here, in this field.”
A stag approached, his dark eyes seeming to take me in. Stories of those people have been passed down, whispered in the memory of the forest. Those men smelled like blood.
I nodded, mouth dry at his magnificence. “They would use the magic here for harm. They are coming, and the Summerwoods will fight them. But we are afraid that might not be enough.”
A fox peered at me through grasses. What do you ask of us?
I licked my lips. “I ask you to be vigilant. To warn us if strangers come to this land. If they approach, we need to know to be prepared. Can you...can you do that for us?”
The possum crept forward. You leave me cat food. I will watch.
The stag lowered his head. You do not hunt my family. I will watch, too.
The bats squeaked overhead. You give us shelter. We will watch.
The snake slid over my shoe. You do not kill me when you see me. I will watch.
The bobcat crept at the edge of the woods. You give me untouched land to roam. I will watch, too.
The owl futtered its wings. You leave water for us when the creek is frozen. I will keep watch.
One by one, the animals agreed. All but the skeptical fox. He sat before me, staring up at me with reflective eyes, before demanding: Why should I help you?
I crouched down to look at him. I might be able to talk to animals, but I never wanted to compromise their free will. “I don’t know you. But I mean you no harm. Go in peace, and I hope that we may someday be friends.”
A tongue lolled from the fox’s mouth, and he seemed to consider me with less skepticism than before. And that is what you have given us on this land. Peace. Your neighbors allow their children to chase us, while the adults poison and try to kill us. This place is a place of peace, and it should remain so. I will watch.
Tears stung my eyes. I had never thought of what this place meant to the animals who lived here, that it was an oasis for them. I knew how the animals in the barn and the clinic felt, but it was difficult to know what the wild ones perceived. But I knew they loved this place as much as I did.
“I will do everything I can to defend this place,” I vowed. “Thank you.”
The animals faded into the grass and slipped behind the trees. A feeling of serenity swept over me. I had faith in the creatures of the earth who had promised to warn us of danger. Nothing would escape their gazes.
I turned to find Bristol and Renan watching me from a respectful distance away. I walked back to them. Bristol licked my left hand, while Renan took my right.
“You are powerful,” he said. “Powerful and magnificent.”
A blush crept up my cheeks, and I began to protest, but Renan placed his finger on my lips. “No. You have brought the beasts of the forests and the fields together. You summoned all of them. This is your land, and you are queen of it.”
I wanted to protest, but what Renan said reverberated in me, the way a revealed secret did. I had never felt like a powerful witch before now.
“And I would be honored to serve you.” He reached for me, his hand sliding up my jaw. He dipped his head and kissed me.
His mouth was hot, searingly so. I melted into the kiss, feeling a surge of passion, of aliveness that I had not felt before. Maybe it was because Renan was magic. Maybe we were magic together. I couldn’t tell, but I just wanted to sink into it, to feel his hands on me and bask in his warmth.
In that moment, I wanted to draw him down into the tall grasses, to make love to him under the stars.
But I was conscious that there were eyes on us. Too many eyes.
I felt Bristol’s cold nose at my knee.
“Um, Luna? Can I have a snack?”
I broke away and gazed up at Renan. His fingers lingered in my hair, and a smile crossed his lips, mirrored by my own.
WHEN I FINALLY GOT to bed, my head was turning with too many thoughts and incantations. I changed into my pajamas and laid down in bed, a bed that was suddenly too crowded.
I lay between Starr and Halley. Starr held a pendulum over a piece of paper she’d scrawled with various astrological symbols and letters. Halley had pulled a spellbook from the basement, a very old one full of dust and green mold; I sneezed whenever she flipped a page. The two cats lay on my chest as I tried to scan Belinda’s 1950s spiral-bound cookbook for more useful magic. Bristol snored on my feet.
I had decided that what Belinda offered done was powerful stuff—her message in a bottle spell had brought my sisters home. And had tagged Renan. My brow still wrinkled at that. Renan was meant to help us, by happenstance or fate, I was sure of it. But I wasn’t sure what else he was meant to be.
“So what’s up with that guy? Renan?” Halley asked, not moving her gaze from her own book. “He’s hot.”
“It’s complicated.” I didn’t really want to talk about him.
“She likes him,” Starr said, her gaze roving over the pendulum she dangled before her. The amethyst point swirled over a scrawled Yes. “She likes him a lot.”
I rolled my eyes. “Can you not interrogate me with that?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Seems fair for us to get the lay of the land.”
“I think we’re past the point of secrets.” Halley flipped another page, and I sneezed.
I turned my attention back to Belinda’s book. Belinda recorded a lot of her dreams about various mundane-seeming things. She’d described herself as a kitchen witch, and she did a good job of describing the optimal times to do various household chores according to what she dreamed. A dream of a plow meant it was time to plant corn. A dream of the ocean meant it was time to clean out the refrigerator. If she dreamed of snow, it was time to inspect the roof.
My finger paused on a paragraph at the end of one of her ramblings about dreams:
“If a witch dreams three nights in a row of a man, that man is her fated love. When she dreams about that man collecting eggs, it’s time to build a new chicken coop. And when that man appears in her dream eating ice cream, there will be a new calf by the next full moon.”
I stopped breathing. If a witch dreams three nights in a row... I couldn’t explain the attraction I felt to Renan. I’d never been given to falling head over heels. I reminded myself that I’d only dreamed of him twice. Two nights in a row, but not three times...
“I mean, I see the way Renan looks at you. Like you’re a snack,” Starr said.
“Look,” I said, wiping my itchy nose. Anger flared redly in me. “You guys can’t just come back in here like you never left and act like you’re owed every facet of my life.”
I jammed Belinda’s book u
nder my pillow and pulled the blanket up to my shoulder. I closed my eyes as if I meant to sleep. My sisters’ gazes were heavy on me. I could feel it. I didn’t care if I’d hurt them in that moment.
“Do you want us to go?” Halley asked, her voice tight.
“I mean, that’s what you guys did.” My voice was thick in my throat. I scrubbed my sleeve across my face. “You left. You got to chase your dreams. And I was here, holding down the fort. I mean...what about my dreams?” I stifled a sob, but I would not open my eyes to look at them.
Silence stretched. Then I heard the moldy book close and the rattle of the pendulum chain as it was wadded up.
“I’m sorry,” Halley said. “And I’m not. I’m sorry for how it hurt you to stay behind, that you felt you had to. But I can’t apologize for living my own life.”
“I wish that things had been different,” Starr said. “I wish that I had been able to be here, and still grow into myself.”
“And you don’t think I felt that, too?” My words were sharp, and my eyes snapped open. “You don’t think I felt stifled, and unaccomplished, and gave up on every dream I had to stay in this small town and trim horse hooves?”
“You didn’t have to stay,” Halley said.
I laughed bitterly. “And then what? Abandon Celeste, what’s left of our family to go haring off to some zoo in California? Where would we be now?”
Starr rested a hand on mine. “The Casimir would already have the Summerwood land. And who knows how many people would suffer because of that?”
I sighed. “I never got to have a life, you know? I never got to have adventures, do great things. I dated the local guy, went to bed early, and paid my bills on time.”
Halley placed her hand on my other hand. “We’re here now. We’re not going anywhere. It’s time I came home, for good.”
I blinked, stunned. “You can’t mean that.”
Halley lifted a shoulder, and her gaze was distant. “I flew as far as I could, away from this place. But I could never forget the magic shows that we’d put on in the summers.”
I sniffled back a string of snot. “You were the Queen of Illusions. And we were your faithful assistants.”
“When I wasn’t busy impersonating one or the other of you to get out of chores,” Halley said, her gaze distant. “I’ve flown everywhere. Seen everything. But...even disregarding this crisis, I feel pulled back here. It’s time...it’s time for someone else to watch the hearth while you go wander.” She smiled at me and squeezed my hand.
Starr had been silent, gazing through her thick curtain of hair at me. “It was time for me to come back too, even if for a little while. The voices of the dead have gotten...loud.” She winced. “Here, I was always able to make them be quiet. Here, I could sleep through the night without dreaming.”
Halley frowned. “I haven’t been sleeping, either. I dreamed...” she shuddered. “I dreamed of strange things. Of being called by that well in the basement.”
“I’ve been dreaming, too,” I confessed. “Of Renan.”
Halley’s eyebrow crawled up her forehead. “Oh, you have to tell us about that.” She rolled over so that she was facing me.
I turned away, dislodging cats, but Starr was facing me in the other direction. There was no escape.
I sighed. “I had fragments of dreams. I saw Renan, fleeing the Casimir. I saw him when he was changed, bitten, turned into a shifter. Bits of his past.”
“You’ve never had dreams like that before.” Starr frowned. “Do you think that your powers might be changing, that you might be developing clairvoyant abilities?”
“I don’t know. It’s just been these past two nights.” Two nights, not three, I told myself.
“Maybe you have a special connection to him,” Starr suggested.
“Maybe your magic is seeking his. And those abs,” Halley teased.
I groaned and tugged the covers up over my head. “Guys, this is hard enough with my ex in the house. An ex whose life I have clearly ruined, who’s locked up in a dog cage in the clinic.”
“I mean, that assumes that there’s no cure to his lycanthropy,” Halley said.
“I’ve been combing the books downstairs,” I said. “I haven’t found anything.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be found,” Starr said. “Or discovered.”
I peeped up over the blanket. “You think we can cure them?”
“I don’t know,” Halley said. “But we can try. After we figure out what to do with the Casimir.”
I glanced at the window. No bats or owls had come to thrash against the glass. I was dead tired, but I was also wired, afraid I’d miss any threats.
Halley reached over to click off the lamp. “This place is guarded by your forest friends, Snow White. Get some sleep.”
I closed my eyes. The cats began to purr, and I fell into the darkness of dreams, wondering if Renan would be waiting there for me.
CHAPTER 16
I walked through cold marble halls. The vaulted ceilings were high, almost shrouded in darkness. Paintings hung on the walls, illuminated by carefully aimed spotlights, and glass cabinets held glittering jewelry specimens. I knew very little about art, but I recognized some art nouveau motifs, stylized vines, and women with flowing hair.
It was clearly a museum. I wasn’t sure from where, or when. There were no windows, and no way to determine if it was day or night. I saw no other people as I wound through exhibits containing ancient sarcophagi, golden tiaras, and military uniforms pinned on mannequins.
I wasn’t dressed in my usual jeans. Here, I was wearing a black cocktail dress. It was sleeveless, with a Grecian neckline, exposing the moon tattoo on my left shoulder. My hair was pinned up off of my neck in an elegant updo. I should have had difficulty walking in the heels I was wearing. But I knew I was dreaming because my feet didn’t quite touch the floor.
I entered a gallery room containing an ancient ship suspended from the ceiling. Oars were frozen in air, and I gazed up at its scarred hull. I could imagine the roar of water around it, pulling it forward on a journey. I wondered if this was a luxury ship meant for a king to travel, or if it was a boat meant for war. I looked for a placard to describe it, but found none. There were no explanations at all in this place, as if I was meant to make up the histories myself.
A figure stood at the opposite side of the gallery, a familiar one. He was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, with no tie. He looked up at the boat with his hands clasped behind his back. Here, he seemed in his element, his hazel gaze roving over that boat suspended from the ceiling. A dark wave of hair curled just over his brow.
“Renan.” I stood beside him.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he murmured, looking up at the boat. “It was found in a pharaoh’s tomb, perfectly intact. It was intended to take the pharaoh to the afterworld, packed with all his treasures.”
“I always assumed that when one died, you can’t take it with you.”
Renan lifted a shoulder. “Many civilizations believed otherwise. I suppose that one day, we’ll know for certain.”
“This place. Renan, is it a place in the real world?”
“It’s an amalgamation of many places I’ve visited,” he said. “It changes every time I visit it in my dreams.”
“It’s beautiful.” I walked with him, gazing at the exhibits. He took my hand, pointing out to me a scepter that belonged to a forgotten queen, pieces of pottery that had come from a Roman wine amphora. With joy, he described the process of creating the vitreous blue glaze on a life-size sculpture of an Egyptian woman. I listened to him talk about these things, marveling at the depth of his knowledge.
“Had you always wanted to do this? Work with museums?”
He laughed and rubbed his stubbly jaw. “In some ways. When I started out, I wanted to be a painter. I went to art school, the whole nine yards. I struggled for a few years, then decided that I liked eating and paying rent. So I went back to school and fel
l into the insurance business. I lucked into a job for an auction house and managed to foil a burglary.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“Well, it was a really clumsy attempt at a burglary,” he admitted. A man was selling his ex-wife’s jewelry collection. It had some nice pieces—original Tiffany and such. The ex-wife was infuriated by this and went with her boyfriend to break in to get it back. I was in the open vault, photographing a pair of earrings for insurance purposes when the boyfriend broke in and shot a security guard. The woman launched herself across my table and tried to dump as much as she could grab into this giant handbag. I still remember that bag—it was bright green and the size of a suitcase.”
He shook his head. “All I could think was that I was going to lose my job, and I’d be back in the starving artist business. So I slammed the vault door shut on them. They completely lost their minds. I tussled with the boyfriend, and we both got busted up pretty bad, but the gun went flying underneath a cabinet. I managed to knock him out and sat down in the middle of the floor to wait for the police.
“The ex-wife told me her story, about how all that jewelry was hers and that it hadn’t been awarded to her husband in the divorce. There was sobbing, crying...I was never so happy to see the police when they showed up and took the both of them away.” A sheepish grin crossed his face. “I asked my boss for a raise. He sent me home with a rare bottle of Clicquot and told me to name my price.”
“That sounds like a very glamorous life,” I said. Especially compared to my life of mud and trimming dog nails. We’d stopped before a glass case of jewelry, and I wondered if one of those pairs of art nouveau earrings in the shapes of dragonflies belonged to the ex-wife in his tale.
“It can be,” he said. “But a lot of it is just sifting through paperwork and analyzing data. I’m never home.”