Goldenseal

by Gill McKnight

  “Leone.” Amy tried to jerk away, squirming. Several more nipping kisses covered both her butt cheeks, and a deeper growl commanded her to keep still. All uncertainty at Leone’s intentions was stripped away as her crease was parted and a thick tongue run along its entire length. Amy’s head kicked back, and she gave an involuntary whimper. The tongue laved her again and again, and suddenly she was back there, in the past, drowning in the dizziness of Leone’s power and sexual energy, her body enslaved with every lusty act of worship carried out upon it.

  Amy tried to clench but immediately Leone pushed deeper, this time concentrating solely on her anus, worrying it and rimming it firmly. Amy’s skin prickled, her nerves leapt and quivered. Her mind screamed disapproval of this animalistic act, but her body was more than eager to embrace the sensations dancing along every nerve ending. Wriggling under the attention only increased the grip on her waist and the ferocity of the investigating tongue. Her weak attempts to pull away seemed to excite Leone into delivering more punishing nips and bites across her buttocks. All were designed to make Amy twitch and squirm deliciously.

  Amy’s face burned at the hot breath on her intimate flesh. Her heart hammered, fueled by her moral dismay, and a volcanic heat burned in her groin.

  Leone’s free hand wormed between her thighs and unerringly found her clitoris, which much to Amy’s disbelief was incredibly plump and erect, totally connected to this new sexual high.

  “Leone,” she managed to blurt before the practiced fingers began to thrum. “Oh, God.”

  She was being cleverly played by a knowing lover. These hands knew her body, remembered it well. The sly tongue knew even more. It knew secrets even Amy was unaware of. Her thighs splayed, offering more of herself to the questing fingers, pushing her ass higher into the hungry mouth. She was panting now, her burning face buried in the pillow, clutching the sheet, her entire body rolling on Leone’s tongue and fingertips. Her mind was spinning like a tossed coin. Orgasm tore her apart without warning, and she screamed into the pillow—another thing she had only ever done with Leone. No one else could make her cry out like a lost and wounded animal.

  Finally, she lay belly down, stunned and gasping, trying to recover her breath. Leone rose and straddled her. Large hands squeezed her buttocks together firmly as Leone ground her own wet, aching need into her. She came quickly and quietly, after just a few short strokes, grunting Amy’s name softly into the dark.

  Leone lay sated and relaxed, looking over contentedly at her panting, prostrate partner. Amy managed to roll onto her back with great effort, and Leone reached over to brush the damp curls from her forehead.

  “Never leave our bed again. Don’t you know you’re mine?” she said.

  “Yours?”

  “Mine. All mine. I love you. I always have. I’ve never stopped.” Leone played with another stray curl. Amy reached up and stilled her hand.

  “That’s our past, Leone, not our future. I don’t want to be owned. I want us to be lovers. Real people, who share, and talk openly and honestly, not ghosts from some unresolved past.”

  “You’re my mate. You always have been.” Leone’s face tightened.

  “We’re lovers, Leone. There’s no rejection here. We’ve been down this road before, and we both know where it can end. I’m here for a few weeks’ contract, and to see how Connie is. Then I’ll go back to London and my life. Let’s just see where this takes us over time.”

  “Why are you denying this? You can’t leave. Have you been talking to Marie or Connie? How can you take their side? Can’t you see we’re meant to be together?” Leone sat up, agitated.

  Amy scooted upright, too. She leaned back against the headboard, drawing the sheet up over her chest.

  “Leone, I need to go slow. I was hurt all those years ago. I lost so goddamn much. Confidence, self-esteem, trust in my own emotional decisions—and it wasn’t as if I had that much to start out with. I lost you as my best friend. I lost you as my first love. In a way I even lost this valley, a place where I felt safe, and loved, and protected. I felt as if I’d lost my home. I was young, and losing you exploded my whole world in so many ways back then. But I can’t afford for that to happen again. The sex between us is fantastic, it always was, but it’s not going to be all there is.”

  “My world exploded, too. They sent me away. They said we were too young. That I was bad for you.” Leone floundered, the explanation drying up in her mouth. Guilt poured out of her. She ached for this to be right. To be able to make it right, but years of waiting had not prepared her for this conversation. It had popped up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Leone couldn’t explain—not yet.

  “They?”

  “Marie and Connie. I went to Vancouver and you went to college in London. They wanted us apart. You know the rest.”

  “Marie and Connie sent us away. To stop us being together? But why? We were young, but we weren’t that stupid. We were doing no one any harm. Why did they do that?” Amy was genuinely hurt at this revelation. There had to be some reason behind it. Marie and Connie were not hurtful, domineering people. Amy knew as a child she had been cared for, in fact, practically raised, by both of them. Their disapproval made no sense.

  Leone looked away. Amy could see her intense unhappiness. She placed a hand on the tanned shoulder.

  “Leone, why did you ask if I’d been speaking to Connie? How could I? She’s in the retreat.” The shoulder stiffened under her touch.

  “I…I meant earlier. Years ago. I wondered if you’d ever discussed it. That’s what I meant.” She looked defeated, miserable, and angry. Amy wanted to hold her in her arms and make all the hurt go away, but they had to have this talk. This was their new foundation. She was determined if they had any chance at all they had to talk now. She also knew if she reached out to comfort Leone they would be thrashing all over the bed again, avoiding the main issue. It was Leone’s way of old, to hide in lust and hope all those unspoken emotions would simply sort themselves out.

  “Tell me the truth about last night,” Amy said. Leone whipped around to face her, eyes guarded.

  “The truth?”

  “About you and Claude hitting the deer. About why you were covered in blood? I was driving his truck today, and it’s fine.”

  “I never said it was Claude’s truck. We were in Robért’s. He’s taken it to the shop to get hammered out.” The answer was too quick, too glib. Amy tried to remember the exact words of last night’s conversation and gave up. She knew she was being lied to. Her heart shrank. She tried again.

  “Then tell me about the anniversary almanac you’re planning with Connie. Why does it need those strange marks all over the illustrations?”

  Leone’s face became a hard, defensive mask. “You want to be told a lot about other people’s business. Why don’t you tell me about your work? How much have you done, if any? I see you everywhere you shouldn’t be. Ignoring my advice and my orders. Have you done any work between your childish acts of autonomy?”

  Amy bristled. “You’re attacking me and my work? My work? You shit—”

  “Very professional, Amy.” Leone flew out of the bed and headed for the ladder.

  “What? You started an argument and now you’re leaving? What happened to not leaving our bed in anger?”

  Leone kept moving, ignoring her.

  “Typical of you—make a run for it when talking has to be done.” Amy was furious. “Is this our future? Is this us communicating? Is this your friggin’ protection? Fuck and run.”

  Amy was up on her knees shouting at Leone’s back before she dipped down the ladder and out of sight. Leone spun around and in a flash was crouched on the bed beside her, nose to nose. Her eyes glittered with anger. Her lips pulled back into a snarl, her breath heavy with Amy’s sex scent.

  “Yes, Amy. We fuck. Fucking is what we do because you won’t call it love.”

  Before Amy could blink she had turned and practically leapt down the ladder. She flung open the door and walked n
aked into the night with a bitter parting shot. “And if fucking is all you want, I can do that for you, too.”

  Amy watched her go, dismayed at the morass they had descended into after such intense intimacy. She blushed at the memory of what they had just done. It would be so easy to see the sexual tsunami they were surfing as an indicator of their emotional state. Leone certainly saw it that way. But it was not so for Amy. Leone was too forceful in bed. Too quick to grab at the pleasure and try to avoid the painful self-examination they both had to make. Leone was erotic and animalistic. She saw love as heart-numbing, mind-bending sex, not the complicated mix of trust and compromise it actually was.

  Amy had the audacity to want more, to demand more. She wanted truth and honesty, not just a climactic high that for one brief, existential moment wiped away all the worries of the world. She wanted a real, hard-won, forever love—but only if Leone was going to fight for it alongside her.

  If Amy was going to buy into a happy-ever-after story, she was damn well going to write the ending herself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Amy slept in the following morning. Heavy overnight rain and the satisfied hum of her body lulled her into a deep and desperately needed sleep. It was too miserable outside for fieldwork; today she was studio bound.

  Taking time for domestic chores, she threw some clothes into the washer. In the pocket of her jeans she found her lucky bullet. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have live ammunition in your pocket. The wash cycle hummed along as she examined her tiny lucky charm. Was it tipped with silver? How bizarre. A silver bullet. In the movies the whole casing had to be silver to kill the werewolf. Was this another of Connie’s charms from the Wicca book? At least it explained the smelter in the studio. Amy giggled; if she dug deep enough she was bound to find a spell that said you needed a dozen of these, and the blood of a mermaid.

  Was it even a real bullet? Could you mess around artistically with live ammunition, adding decorative embellishments? Why not engrave them: “With Love,” or “Surprise.”

  Amy snorted and fetched the Ruger Bearcat. The bullet slid home happily. Well, there you go. She emptied the chamber and left the gun on the mantel, dropping the bullet in her jacket pocket where it hung by the door. It was still significant to her. Maybe even charmed? She would keep it for luck. Though she scoffed, she was uneasy with her discovery. Amy didn’t like it that Connie was into witchcraft and playing with silver bullets. It seemed so unlike her stoic aunt. Was all this related to the code, too?

  The code now firmly back in her thoughts, Amy pulled the mysterious book from last night down from the shelf. Something about its cover played on her mind. She stood turning the heavy handmade tome in her hands. The cover art was beautiful, if not a little macabre. What was pulling her? She examined the entire book. Whatever it was it was not registering on her consciousness.

  With a dissatisfied sigh she began to slide the book back into its new home. Again, she paused. The spines on the bookshelf all blended into one another in a colorful mass. Amy stood and waited for her thoughts to clear. This often happened to her when her head was elsewhere, buried in the details of an illustration, or in this case the mechanisms of a cipher. She knew from past experience all she had to do was stand still, and whatever was tugging at her mind would slowly materialize. Sometimes it was something as silly as the laundry dial needed setting. Other times she had maybe forgotten to make a call to the bank, or had a dental appointment. A few times she had nearly missed a lunch date with friends. If she relaxed and cleared her head the answer would come to her. Something was bugging her, but what?

  A little pig in a wimple sat on the spine of a Bosch art book, the twin of Marie’s copy. Hieronymus Bosch? Amy frowned. The pig was from the Hell section of his Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. A painting that was everywhere in Little Dip. She’d seen it on Claude’s key fob, Marie’s wall, and Leone’s screensaver. She’d even noticed it emblazoned on a T-shirt across Paulie’s skinny chest.

  Amy stilled with the new book not quite slotted into place. The naked man hanging through the passkey on its cover. That was Bosch symbolism if ever she saw it. It was certainly his style.

  She pulled out the Bosch art book. Its dustcover was a detailed rendition of part of his famous Garden triptych. Spreading the cover out on the table, she was better able to look at the painting in detail. There he was, the man halfway through the key, in Hell, poor bastard—The key! Halfway through the key! She was halfway through the code. The book was the halfway point. It was so obvious. Now that she saw it, she felt incredibly stupid.

  With trembling hands she fetched the acetate grid she had used to scale down her artwork and that also matched Marie’s bizarre recipe amounts. The same grid, that when placed over Connie’s illustrations had each mysterious mark falling dead center of a square. But that was all she had found—something had been missing, a second key to make sense of it all. Now it was here in her hands. A book in an ancient language. It had been secretly gifted to her last night. She had an ally. Someone wanted her to break the code and find the Garoul secret.

  The Garden of Earthly Delights was the third element of her cipher. Somehow it was the link between the almanacs and the langue d’oc dictionary. Amy frowned at the dust jacket on the table before her. Her artist’s eye sized up the book cover with the grid. It wasn’t a good fit. This was the wrong rendition of the painting. The scale was incorrect and parts were cut away to fit in with the book design.

  Amy needed a full copy set in the original dimensions. Only that would match up properly. And she knew just where to find one.

  In Marie’s office.

  The rain did not let up for her walk down to the compound.

  “Yo, Amy. Don’t tell me you’re out working in this?” Jori met her halfway across the central clearing.

  “Hi, Jori. No, I’m working indoors today with all the sensible people. Is Marie around?”

  “Leone drove her into Covington. Time to stock up the larder.”

  This was good news; a larder run to the largest nearby town’s food markets was practically an all-day chore. Hopefully, she’d have more than enough time to try out her theory on the print over Marie’s desk.

  “Okay. I’m going to do some work over at her place. I’ll catch up with you and Elicia later.”

  The first thing on the agenda was to make sure her guess was right and the Bosch triptych was part of the overall code. With the painting laid out on Marie’s big cedar table, Amy pulled the acetate grid from her backpack. She carefully aligned it with the edges of the actual print, not the frame.

  It fit.

  Amy held her breath; several painted figures now fell neatly into some of the squares, just as the marks had done. She peered closely at them. They were the weird hybrid animals, half-man, half-fish, fowl, dog, boar, wolf, whatever misfit Bosch had imagined. Amy was unsure what they were meant to represent, they were all so fantastical. She did know that every depiction of a human hybrid, half-man half-beast, fell into the center of a grid square as if prearranged to do so.

  “I know what I’m looking for. I know how to break the code,” she whispered in awe to the empty room.

  Borrowing an almanac from Marie’s library, Amy opened it to an illustration with embedded sigils. Laid over Connie’s illustration, each mark fell within a square. Gently, she traced each mark onto the acetate grid with a soft lead pencil.

  Next she placed the marked grid over the print of Bosch’s painting. As it was a triptych, she had three choices. She set it on the first panel, The Garden of Eden, Bosch’s representation of creation. Nothing matched up. The traced sigils marked on the plastic grid did not align with any figure or structure in this panel of the triptych.

  She tried again with the central panel, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicting mankind’s activities on earth. This time a few of the marked squares fell over particular painted figures—the man-beasts. These sigils she transferred to a blank sheet of paper, positioning each as accura
tely as it was on the grid.

  Finally, she moved onto the last panel, Hell, a grim and gory chaos. Several more fantastical human hybrids filled the remaining marked squares. They too were transferred to the writing paper in the positions they were found in.

  Now she had a sheet of paper dotted with sporadic squiggles. It still made no sense, but there were probably hundreds of other marks hidden throughout all the almanacs. At best she would only ever find a few to decode.

  “So basically, a mark in the illustration is only used if it lines up with something in the Bosch painting. That’s the key. That’s all there is to it?” Amy was skeptical. It seemed far too easy now that she had all the elements before her. But then, she supposed that’s how codes worked. They were easy to use once you had the keys.

  The other plant illustrations Amy knew about gave her marks that related to different hybrid figures in the painting. Now they too drifted across her paper pad. Some floated in space; others snuggled up close to each other, forming rough alphabetical letters.

  Amy foraged through Marie’s almanacs and found a few more marks in the illustrations of Solomon’s seal, mandrake, Belladonna, cowslip—all from different years, and all in Connie’s work. How long had the Garouls been doing this? She had no idea how far back it went, but believed probably since the beginning of the Press. Maybe even since the time of Hieronymus Bosch?

  Her head ached. Her eyes were tired and dry. She had barely half a page with a few words and half-formed sentences sprinkled here and there, and all in a nonsense language.

  It was late in the day and she didn’t want to be here when Leone and Marie returned. She was not prepared to confront them with this until she knew exactly what she was decoding. It could be a recipe for steamed fish for all she knew.

  She was thirsty and went to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Marie had been partway through a recipe before she’d left. Idly, Amy examined the dried and fresh herbs sitting out on the bench. Henbane, juniper berries, and white wine. In the right quantities, and in the hands of an expert, this infusion would be a strong and very effective painkiller. A quick glance at the recipe notes amazed Amy. This was a whopper dose. Even a layman like her could see that a spoonful would flatten a horse. She stood and glared at the pan and its contents. What was the point of making such strong potions? Who were they for, and what good could they do?