Avgusta looked from Matjaž to Helena, very confused. “Cow heart? What nonsense are you talking about?”
Helena sighed, or at least approximated one as best she could as vapor or whatever she was. “Your little witch-lette is in way over her head. She thought she was leaving a spell to drive her sister away from Faron. She does pretty shoddy work. It knocked Ivanka on her ass and would’ve blown them all out of the flat if I hadn’t taken matters into my own hands, or rather yours.” She looked at him through her dark lashes.
“You drew a circle in the blood as a containment spell.” Matjaž shook his head. His sister was indeed the same in death as she had been in life.
Helena laughed. “You should get a massage, by the way. You are tense, big brother.”
He wanted to laugh, too. He missed her, but this couldn’t continue. “I’ll take that under consideration.” What he was about to ask, demand, would send her away for good, but it was as things should be. “Apologize to Jo, explain however much you feel you need to explain, and then go. Jo deserves a guide who is not tangled up in Mother’s scheming, willingly or not.”
His mother’s mouth gaped and then set into a grim line. “You can’t do that. I need her!”
“I can ask it of her, and I will.” Helena watched him silently as he turned his pronouncements on their mother. “And you will stop. Helena is dead. I do not want to take father’s place. As you’ll recall, he was eager to give it up. You have done enough damage to my life and to Helena’s; Jo and her son are off limits.”
Helena piped up. “Can I make a request before I go?”
He was surprised she felt the need to ask. “Of course.”
“In addition to letting me go and not calling me back into this ridiculous soup bowl, you will rein in your fledgling sorceress before she hurts herself or someone else. If you’re going to train her, you need to do it properly, or send her to someone like Goran who will.”
His mother looked smaller and more fragile in the folds of her blanket and the confines of her chair, but there was steel in her eyes. “Send her to someone like Goran, so she can pull rabbits out of hats? Ha.”
Matjaž stared at her. “You introduced a traumatized girl to magic without filling in all the details?”
“I needed a lackey, not an apprentice.” She looked up at Helena. “That was supposed to be your job.”
“Well, hopefully, she doesn’t have any other tricks up her sleeve.” Helena cocked her head at her mother. “Can I go now, please?”
“Yes.” His mother took a besom from the altar next to the bowl that held Helena’s spirit. She turned in her chair and swept a section of salt away, breaking the circle and her contact with the Inbetween. Helena vanished.
Avgusta looked up at him. “I’m not going to apologize. I did what I thought was right–”
“No, Mother. You did what you wanted, regardless of who it hurt. And it’s done. I don’t need your apology. I need your promise.”
He took her ceremonial knife from the altar and nicked the fleshy part of his palm with the tip of blade. A bead of dark blood rose instantly. He motioned for her to hold out her hand. She hesitated but complied. He inflicted the same small wound on her and grabbed her forearm, smearing the blood between their hands and wrists.
“Promise me, Mother, that tonight, your campaign to resurrect my father, to confer his former mantle onto Helena or me, or to interfere in the lives of any others to achieve either of those goals, ends. Promise me, you will take no revenge on me, on my sister’s spirit, or any other who has thwarted you in your mission.” He locked his gaze with hers and waited.
She nodded.
“You have to say it. We both know how this works.”
She was defiant still, but he could see defeat wash over her like a blanket of gray descending and muting her colors. “I promise, on our blood. If I make any attempt to break this promise, I forfeit my powers and my life.”
Chapter 20
Rain pattered on the tin roof over her grandmother’s porch. Instead of cooling the hot August evening, it brought steam up in the scorched yard and completely saturated the air. The sound of shelled peas hitting the plastic bowl in front of Jo added counterpoint to the rhythm of the downpour.
Her grandmother sang hymns to herself as she ran a thumbnail along each pea pod. Jo turned to look at the older woman. She wasn’t really so old, maybe mid-forties. And so was Jo. Her dreams just kept getting weirder.
“Jolene, you should know how this works by now.” She set the bag of peas aside. “You’re in a mess of trouble, but I think you’ve figured that out already.”
Jo nodded. “So what do I do?”
“Do? You still think you’re in charge of this dog-and-pony show?”
“I did. I guess that’s not the case.”
“You are only in charge of you, but you aren’t pulling the strings.”
“That I did know.” Was her grandmother about to impart some Dumbledorian advice about our choices making us who we are?
“Well. That’s something. She should be here soon.”
“She who?”
“Who do you think?” Her grandmother pointed out into the garden covering the lawn in front of the house.
Her mother was picking her way through the tomato vines and pole beans. She was old, older than both Jo and her grandmother. Her long, gray hair hung to her waist, and she had on a sundress that left her darkly freckled shoulders bare. Her clavicles stuck out, and her creped skin barely covered the bones.
“Jolene.” Her mother’s voice was softer than the rain but carried to Jo from the bottom of the two sun-baked wooden steps up to the porch.
“Mother.” Jo did not want to do this. Her grandmother took her hand and squeezed her fingers.
“I’m not dead yet, if that’s what you’re wondering. I don’t think it’ll be long now, though.”
Jo doubted it would be, either. Her mother looked all of her sixty-odd years, plus another thirty for good measure. It was a stark contrast to her grandmother’s apparent youth.
“I think you may be joining me in the hereafter soon.”
Jo’s heart skipped but quickly settled back into a steady rhythm. Winifred and Rebecca had hinted at the same fate, but she had been them in the previous dreams. She was very much herself this time.
“I don’t know if she’s right, but I thought you should hear her out anyway.” Her grandmother turned from her to the woman still standing in the rain. “Mary, you can come up on the porch.” Another rocking chair appeared between the ones Jo and her grandmother filled.
Her mother settled into the chair, clutching the armrests like the cane-seat rocker was going to shoot off the porch, dumping her back out into the muddy yard.
“Jolene, your time–”
“It’s ‘Jo,’ Mom.”
“I’ll call you by the name I gave you. Thanks for ruining my big moment.”
Jo rolled her eyes. Some things never changed; her mother was still a drama queen, even in Jo’s own damn dream.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.”
“Stop it, you two. Mary, say your piece. You don’t belong here, and I’ve got no intention of letting you stay any longer than I have to.”
Mary shrugged. “Jo,” she said it like it was a swear word. “It’s time for you to move on. You’ve done what you were supposed to, and he’ll come for you soon.”
“Who is ‘he’?”
“I don’t know. He’s the one that meets us at our end.” She shivered.
“Are you sure you aren’t mixing up the two of us? I barely got started with the soldiers on the mountain. There’s a lot more work to do.” Jo reminded herself that her mother was a Voice, not a prophet.
“He visits me. He tells me things.”
Her mother’s hissed words made Jo’s skin crawl.
Her mother stood up and started to walk back out into the garden and the rain. She looked back over her shoulder and whispered, “He’s coming for us both, Jolene.” She disappeared into the afternoon as silently as she’d come. A corn snake wended its way across the path where her mother had stood.
“Don’t pay her any mind. If I’d known what nonsense she would bring, I wouldn’t have let her in.”
“You know I don’t understand how any of this works, right? You’re dead, but she’s not and somehow you’re in charge?”
“Don’t think everything has to be logical.” Her grandmother gave her The Eye that had sent her and her cousin Michael scampering when they were kids. Hell, it had sent her scampering when she was a teenager.
“Am I going to die?”
“Eventually. I mean that’s how living works. But I don’t think it’s anytime soon.”
“That’s not what ‘he’ said.” Her mother could deliver a creepy-ass line with some conviction.
“He doesn’t warn us. He just shows up. I don’t know who your mama’s been talking to, but it isn’t him.”
“I am not really comforted by that thought, Grandma.”
“Eh. You can comfort yourself or not, however you please.” She picked up the bag of peas again and went back to shelling.
“Grandma, where are you exactly?”
“There’s no exactly to it. I am where I am.”
Shades definitely had the market cornered on being vague as fuck. “Thanks for clearing that up.”
Her grandmother laughed. “I know what you want to ask. You should ask it.”
“Is Dad with you?”
“No.” She shook her head and pursed her lips. “He’s nowhere we can go, and you probably need to accept that.”
“Is Milo there?” She knew where her father was, but she was surprised her grandmother didn’t know she’d been to that place.
“No, child.”
Jo’s heart sank into her stomach. “Did the demon get his soul, too?”
Her grandmother shook her head. “It didn’t, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t lost in his own way.”
“He’s still here?”
“No, honey, he’s dead. You know that.”
“I mean in the Inbetween.”
She looked up from her peas and met Jo’s gaze. “You can’t save them all. That’s not how it works.”
Lightning struck a beanpole in the garden. The thunderclap and the flash came together and pressed the air out of Jo’s lungs.
She woke up gasping in her own bed, soaked to the skin with clammy sweat and drowning in the smell of rotting lilies.
The water had been cold for a few minutes, but she still stood under the showerhead, letting it wash away the lingering floral funk. Lilacs and lilies. Why did demons and assholes think their misdeeds could be hidden behind the scent of nauseating, cloying flowers? There had to be something in that. But what did good magic smell like? Woodsmoke and the earth after a hard rain. It smelled like Dušan. That wasn’t a thought she wanted to linger over too long, either. She’d spent a lot of time building a particularly high and ornate fence around those feelings.
She turned off the water and toweled herself off while walking back to her bedroom. A quick peek out the window over the futon in the living room revealed another day of slate-gray skies and more snow drifting into the courtyard. It was time to get back to work. She needed a distraction, even if the distraction was Fred telling her what to do like she was a trainee.
One other item on her mental to-do list had a bright, red ring drawn around it. She needed to choose a gift for Achelous and take it to the river; they needed to make their peace. He needed to know she was not interested in shacking up with him in his watery bower, but she did respect his power. She was grateful to him for saving her and Faron, even if he’d left the last bit of saving to her after she turned him down. Gods had their pride; that was definitely a thing.
She tapped her phone awake and started a playlist to keep her company while she got dressed. The first few bars of Gogol Bordello’s “Wanderlust King” seeped out of the speakers before she could skip it; for her the song was forever linked to Rok and the last night she’d seen him. The next song was “The Ship Song,” and though there wasn’t a reason, it, too, had become linked with her friend in the wind. It was probably her, and she probably needed to deal with her feelings about his leaving. But it would have to wait. In her new life, there were always too many supernaturally weird things going on to deal with the emotionally troubling mundane flotsam of human existence. Though in truth, her relationship with Rok straddled the everyday and the woo-woo.
The playlist settled into the Johnny Cash cover of “Hurt,” and that would have to be okay. She pulled clothes out of the wardrobe and stood staring out the window of her room. The gauzy curtains were open, and the snow outside was drifting down in fat flakes like ash from a fire. She couldn’t remember the last time it had snowed so much in town. She pulled another layer out to chase away the cold.
Jo met Frédéric in front of the shop. He had a bucket and brush in hand.
“Wouldn’t a broom be more effective?” She glanced down at the bucket of soapy water and the snow piling in soft drifts against the planters.
“It’s not for the snow.” He walked on toward the entrance to the courtyard.
Jo saw it then. Words and symbols scrawled in red spray paint on the heavy wooden doors standing open against the interior wall. The letters stood out like angry wounds. Goran’s wards had kept the assholes away from the shop front, and they’d splashed their hate on the main door instead.
“Is there another brush?”
Fred nodded and kept walking. She went into the shop to get the brush. The bells clanged against the wooden door, announcing her entrance. Ivanka poked her head out of the kitchen and then stepped out behind the bakery case.
“Did you see Fred?”
“Yeah. I came in to get another brush.”
Ivanka ducked back into the kitchen. Jo could hear her rummaging under the sink before she reappeared.
“I offered to help, but Fred said I should get started on prep.” Ivanka looked down at the brush and then back up into Jo’s face. “Do you think Fred’s in danger?”
“No.” The majority of the “Bela Europa” crowd were kids clinging to garbage being fed to them by scapegoaters. “I don’t think it’s a physical threat. They just like to rattle people.”
Ivanka nodded. “It’s so gross. Why would anyone do that?”
“Because they don’t know anything about Fred, or Reka. They think people who are different from them are somehow taking away from them.”
Ivanka exploded with emotion. “But they are angry at the wrong people. They should be pissed off at the people looting the country and leaving everyone else holding the empty bag.”
Jo walked into the kitchen, hoping Ivanka would follow. “You know that, and I know that. Hopefully, when they pull their heads out of their asses, they’ll figure it out, too.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“There’s nothing to do about it. Clean off the paint and keep doing what we do.”
Ivanka picked up her knife again. “That’s what Fred said.”
“Well, Fred is right. I guarantee he’s had to deal with this longer than the two of us.”
“I guess so.” Little o’s of chive fell off Ivanka’s knife into a growing pile.
“I’ll come help with prep when we’re done.”
Fred and Jo scrubbed paint off the door, taking brittle flakes of the dark finish with it. They’d have to repaint when it warmed up. Fred said very little, only an occasional “sorry” when they both tried to dip their brushes into the bucket at the same time.
It was a
shitty thing to happen. She was quiet, too.
“I’m sorry.” She scrubbed the last bit of red paint off her side of the door.
Fred stopped and dropped his brush into the bucket. “You could have told me.”
Jo stepped back, still holding her wet brush in her hands. The snow had started to fall faster and was layering over the last of the dirty snow from the previous storm. “I didn’t know until I got down here.”
“Not about this.” He gestured toward the hard-scrubbed door.
“Oh.” It would’ve been nice to know Vesna had told him about her peculiar gift. To be fair, though, there had been a lot going on.
“It came up when the vandals broke the pots and door.”
“I didn’t think you’d believe me. I mean really, who would want to? And, it gets me and everyone who knows about it into trouble.”
“No judgment, Jo. I understand, but it was clear something was going on.”
Jo nodded. Fred was smart. She’d known she couldn’t keep it from him forever, and she hadn’t planned to. It just wasn’t something that came up easily in conversation.
“You should probably also know something is up with Faron and his father.”
“I do know. I’m just not really sure yet how that’s going to play out.”
“I can see that.” He took her brush from her and dropped it into the bucket. “Are you going to tell Reka?”
Jo stared at him for a minute. “Probably not. She just started, and I’d like to give her a chance before we run her off. You’re ahead of me in this year’s dishwasher betting pool. The last one didn’t last two days.”
“She deserves a chance, but a Romani woman is probably not going to want to be associated with witches, Jo. I’m sure she’s been pegged with her fair share of stereotypes.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that. Shit.” Another thing on the mundane list she’d failed to take care of in some way. “Maybe we should tell her something?”
Fred shrugged. “Maybe it will be fine.”
Her hands were red and chapped, and the cold enveloped her all at once. She shivered.
Fred gestured for her to walk ahead of him across the courtyard. “I’ll make some tea to warm us up, and we can get the day started.” He hadn’t mentioned his surprise at her return to the shop or anything else that needed to be taken care of. She’d never anticipated her business being one of the most stable things in her life.
Our Lady of the Various Sorrows (Voices of the Dead Book 2) Page 16