by Faith Hunter
And then the group of witch haters from the day before started picketing out front. I guess they were in town and figured they should make the most of it. They were carrying signs about not suffering a witch to live—the usual crappola—and chanting, “Save our children! Save our children!” Two cars pulled by and slowed, as if to turn in, and then pulled on away. Such attention was going to be damaging to business.
Jane paid her bill, went outside, and revved up her bike. And revved up her bike. And revved up her bike again. At which point I realized she was doing it on purpose. Then she did something to the engine, and revved it up again. And black smoke came out. So Jane rode in circles around the parking lot, shouting to the witch haters, “So sorry about the noise! I have engine problems!” After about ten minutes of noise, the witch haters left. It was so cool. I thought the twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, were going to have twin cows.
That’s Jane. A loner with a cause. Any cause, as long as it’s protecting someone.
She sneezed, bringing me back from my daydreams to my friend crawling around on the floor of a deserted, possibly haunted house.
The dining room had little floor left, and I could see the ground and the foundation beneath the house, between the struts. Still on her hands and knees, Jane moved into the foyer, circled its perimeter once, ignored the stairs leading to the second story, and crawled into the parlor beyond. I followed, watching from the foyer, which had been exposed when the construction crew pulled off the old boards covering the entrance. Oddly enough, though every other room in the house showed the results of men with mallets and hammers and crowbars, the parlor had still not been touched. The finish of the original handmade woodwork below the chair railing and the moldings at the ceiling were dark and filthy, the plaster between was cracked and split with water damage, and the last bits of old, red wallpaper curled, hanging loose, covered with spiderwebs and the dust of decades.
I stood in the six-foot-wide opening, watching my best friend track through the dust. The flooring beneath the accumulated filth was wood parquet, probably cut from the land the house stood on, milled by the lumber baron who built the house in the previous century. He had died a gruesome death, killed by a bear beside his train car, or so the old story went. His son had married a witch, and their daughter had inherited, and so had her daughter. However, the old house hadn’t been occupied in decades, not since Monique Ravencroft, the most powerful witch in the Appalachians, had disappeared without a trace.
The family had died out except for a son who no longer wanted the property, and the old house had been sold to a local lawyer for his business offices. Construction had begun quickly thereafter. The workers, however, had abandoned the project two days ago, after a flying mallet attacked a plumber standing in an empty room. The construction company owner had asked the local coven in the little township of Hainbridge to investigate, but the women had had no luck identifying the spiritual miscreant. They had called me in to discover if the troublemaker was a ghost, demon, or haint—haint being a term applied, in this part of the woods, to a form of poltergeist, or supernatural energy that usually manifests around a person instead of around a place. Whatever had attacked the plumber, it needed to be identified so the coven could coerce or force it to vacate the premises. Unfortunately, all I’d found was a sense of something dead in the house, and I’d had no luck calling to or talking to any non-corporeal would-be-killer. I hoped Jane, with her hyper senses, might discover something I had missed.
Jane sniffed around the fireplace on the far side of the room, the interior walls black with wood or coal smoke, the old grate rusted through and coated with spider webs. She seemed to find the opening uninteresting, and moved on to the corner. She paused there, repeating the openmouthed sniffing, and looked up, puzzled. “Molly, are you sure there’s something dead here?”
I nodded. I’m from a long family of witches, all of us pretty much in the witch-closet, and while I’m an earth witch, with the gift of growing plants, healing bodies, and restoring balance to nature, I’m a little unusual for an earth witch, in that I can sense dead things. And there was definitely something dead in this house somewhere.
“I smell witch and vamp,” Jane said.
The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. “Vampire? There shouldn’t be a vampire here.”
“It’s been years, but I think . . .” She put her nose back to the dust covered floor, sniffed delicately, and started sneezing. She rolled to her feet and crossed the room, sneezing all the way, her nose buried in the crook of her elbow to keep her filthy hands away from her face. I counted twelve sneezes before she stopped and her face was red from the sneeze effort. “I think I smell vamp and witch together,” she said, the back of a wrist to her nose, pressing against more sneezes, “and both of them were bleeding.” She stood beside me and turned to face the room. The evidence of her crawling progression was a clear trail through the layers of dust.
“Moll,” she said, “I dropped a stake.” She pointed to the fourteen-inch-long stake in the corner. “Would you go get it, please?”
“No,” I said instantly.
“Why not? You chicken?”
Anger shot through me. “I’m not going—” I stopped, and the anger filtered out of me. Around me the house seemed to wait, expectant, and I turned in a slow circle, standing in the doorway, letting my senses flow out, seeing the hand-carved woodwork, the once-elegant stairs leading up to the second floor, the carpenter’s ladder against the wall. Smelling the dust, the fresh wood, the dirt under the house, and the sweat of the workers from two days past. Hearing the small sounds an old house makes, the pops and quiet groans. Feeling the breath of the house as air moved through it, cool and moist from the open floor and up the stairs, a faint trickle of breeze. I opened my mouth, as Jane did, and breathed, almost tasting the house, its age, elegance, and history.
Midway around, I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. The magic I hadn’t noted pricked against my skin, cool and light, old, old, old magic, a spell frayed around the edges, one that hadn’t been renewed in decades. “A ward,” I muttered, “combined with something else. Maybe a keep-away spell. Yeah. I can feel it, feel them both, combined. It was a really good one to have lasted this long.” I opened my eyes and studied Jane. “How’d you sense it when I didn’t?”
“Dust,” she said succinctly. At my puzzled expression, she said, “Every room in this place has been walked over, beaten on, knocked down, and partially renovated except this one. The footsteps all go right up to the entrance,” she pointed down to the floor at our feet, “where they removed whatever had been covering the room. And here they stop. I was the first person to so much as step into the room.”
A small smile pulled at her lips, half-proud, half-embarrassed. “I’m guessing the spell treated me like a big-cat. And since hanging around you and Big Evan so much, I’ve realized that sometimes I can feel witch magics. Cool and sparkly on my skin.”
That was a surprise. Humans can only feel magics when the spell is directed at them, as in a keep-away spell that shocks anyone who touches the spelled item. But then, Jane Yellowrock isn’t human. I can do magic—it’s in my very genes, passed along on the X-chromosome from parent to child—but Jane is magic. And scary sometimes.
“Okay.” I sat on the floor in the foyer, outside the opening to the parlor, and reached out with my magics. Immediately I saw the spell. It was mostly green, smelling of pine and hemlock and holly, marking the caster as an earth witch, like me. I held out my hands and touched the edges of the conjure; it flashed against my fingertips painfully, hot and cold together, with minute darker green flashes of deeper pain. Once I concentrated, I could see the parameters of the incantation and the place it was protecting, the far corner of the room where the dust was deepest. A bit of cloth was in the corner, like a man’s old-fashioned handkerchief, and an old newspaper, the rubber band disintegrated into blue goo from the heat and moisture of the long-sealed room. A curl of wall
paper had fallen across it too. I guessed that the spell was tied to an amulet, probably hidden beneath the trash. I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans.
“So,” I said, “I guess I need to push through the spell and get a feel for what is causing the problem.” The instant I said the words, a sense of dread fell on me. I knew, completely and totally, that if I went into the room, I was going to die. Worse, my child would die. I sucked in a breath, and it burned my throat. My husband would die. Tears stared in the corners of my eyes. And the deaths would be horrible, painful, tortured deaths. It was illogical and stupid and clearly the results of the spell. But it was also real. I backed away, three unsteady steps. And the spell faded.
“Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed.
Jane was leaning against the molding in the opening, arms crossed, watching me. “Bad?”
“Totally and completely sucky.” I described what I had been made to feel by the spell. “Whoever created that spell was good. Really, really good. And frighteningly inventive.”
Jane nodded, only her head and the tip of her long braid moving. “The worker who nearly got brained by the magical, flying hammer, was he getting ready to go in here?” she asked.
“Yes. Why?” I asked.
“Because that ladder,” she tilted her head to the metal step ladder, “wiggled when you decided to go in. I figured it was going to fly across the room and hit you if you didn’t back off.” Her lips pulled again in that half smile that was uniquely hers. “I was going to catch it before it hit you, of course.”
“Thanks,” I said, eyeing the ladder. “Like I said. That is a really good spell.” I pointed to the corner. “I have a feeling that the original incantation is tied to something in that corner. Maybe an amulet hidden under the trash.”
Jane nodded and uncrossed her arms. Stepping close, she pushed me farther away from the parlor opening and into the dining room opening on the other side of the foyer. Out of the way of flying carpenter tools, I realized. It was an odd dance-step-of-a-move and Jane grinned down at me. She was a dancer, and I had three left feet and couldn’t follow her; I nearly fell. “Careful,” she said, holding me steady.
“Don’t get hurt,” I blurted.
Jane chuckled softly. “My reflexes are fast.”
“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Still . . .”
Jane shook her head in amusement and dropped to her knees again. She crawled into and around the parlor, one shoulder and hip brushing against the walls, just the way a cat would explore a room, around the outer edges first. When she reached the wallpaper and cloth on the far side, she batted the paper away in a move so catlike I covered my face to stifle a giggle. Then Jane grabbed up the cloth in two hands, held like paws, and rolled over with it, sending up clouds of dust. When her sneezing fit subsided, she batted the cloth away too, revealing a snake.
I lifted my hand to warn Jane, which was stupid as she had already lifted the snake to expose it as dry, cracked rubber tubing and small pieces of corroded metal. Jane said, “It looks like some weird kind of stethoscope. And this is the amulet, for sure. My hand is stinging, and some kind of green magic is running all over my skin.” She crawled across the room on three limbs, the stethoscope in her left hand.
It was a weird design, with two earpieces and two flat chest pieces. Near where a doctor’s chin might go, the two pieces were connected with a metal tube that had been wrapped in a circle, like a trumpet’s body, and, like a trumpet, the connecting part was clearly designed to increase and maybe modulate sound waves. The dangling pieces seemed longer than most stethoscopes, and the little circular chest pieces were decidedly old fashioned.
Green magics emanated from them and were climbing Jane’s arm and wrapping around her body. Before she reached the doorway, and before the magic reached her head, she dropped the device and swatted it, just like an irritated cat. The spell instantly went still, into stasis, and Jane crawled out of the room, shaking her head, muttering, “I know. I know. I don’t like it either.” She crossed the entry to the room and stood, brushing off her clothes, scowling. But with Jane a scowl meant nothing; an expressionless face meant even less. At her best, Jane was inscrutable, and I’d always put that down to her being found in the mountains by park rangers, with no memory of anything, no language, no people, no nothing, and then being raised in a children’s home and learning how to socialize—or not socialize—in an artificial “family.”
Now that the amulet was closer, I knelt and studied it. From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased, but when I looked up, nothing had changed. Outside the windows, the wind picked up, and buffeted the house. I shrugged and went back to studying. The chest-pieces were made of some kind of plastic, maybe like that Bakelite stuff that was so popular in the early nineteen hundreds. If so, then that dated the device to that era. My grandmother had Bakelite jewelry and it was quite collectable. The stethoscope was in fairly good repair, even the rubber parts, which one might have expected to disintegrate.
I heard clicks to my side and looked up to see that Jane had pulled a small digital camera out of her boot and was taking pictures of the house and the amulet. I made a small mmm of approval, but the photos might be blurred. Magics did that to photos sometimes.
From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased again, and developed a distinct rhythm. “Molly!” Jane shouted. Suddenly she was standing over me, her arms lifting high. She caught a wooden headboard as it roared down the stairs and slammed at me. “Out!” she shouted again, as she tossed the headboard and caught the flying footboard, using it to deflect a flying drawer or three from a bedroom upstairs.
Crouching to make a smaller target of myself, I raced for the front door, which flung itself open to allow me passage. Jane followed and the door slammed behind her. She pulled me to the street fast, the winds I had noted only moments before dying when we reached the curb.
“Is that the spell or is the house alive?” she demanded.
It might be a dumb or bizarre question to most people, but not to me, and clearly not to Jane. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed to ask Evangelina, my older sister and our new coven mistress since mama retired and moved two towns over to take care of grandma.
“Great. Just ducky.” Jane scowled as she brushed more dust off her clothes. “Fine. One thing I can tell you. A vamp owned that stethoscope. I could smell him all over it.”
* * *
Back in Spruce Pine, I picked up my daughter, Angelina, from the family café where my younger sisters were watching her and arrived home, to our new house, before Big Evan did. My girl was worn out after playing with my wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, which meant she went down for a nap while I fixed supper. I put Angie Baby in her bed and covered her with the blankie that Evangelina had crocheted while Angie was still kicking my insides out in the last horrible month of pregnancy.
When we painted the new house—after we lost the mobile home—I had chosen the soft sage-green color for Angie’s room based on the blankie, which my daughter loved. Darker green leprechauns and brown brownies sat on huge calla lily leaves beneath a magical spreading oak tree. Unicorns pranced in the background and rainbows crossed the horizon beyond the tree, all painted by Regan and Amelia. What they hadn’t gotten in magical abilities they had made up for in artistic ability and talent. It was a room of love.
In the kitchen, I turned up the Aga, stirred the stew I had left bubbling on the stove, and put a loaf of bread in the oven. I also started a pot of brown rice, to stretch the stew so that Jane could join us. I couldn’t pay her for the work this afternoon, so the least I could do was feed her supper.
I knew Evan was home before he even turned into the drive. The wards we had put up around the house warned me, identifying his signature. He came in, work boots clomping, and put his arms around me. Evan is a huge bear of a man, easily six-feet-six, with red hair and beard, lightly streaked with gray. He is older than I am but with witches’ expanded life spans, that matters less to
us than to humans. When we met it was love at first sight. Lust at first sight too, but that was definitely the lesser of our earth-shattering reactions to one another. Evan was a witch, one of the rare male witches to survive to adulthood, and we were pretty certain that was why Angie Baby’s gift had awakened so early—she had a witch gene from each of her parents, making her the most powerful witch on earth at this time.
“Who’s magics you been playing around with?” he mumbled into my hair, which tumbled over my eyes and tangled with his beard. Mine was not nearly as bright red as his. “Do I need to worry that another witch caught your eye?”
“Absolutely.” I turned in his arms and wrapped mine around him. They didn’t quite reach around his shoulders, but the fit was perfect around his chest and I clasped my hands together in the middle of his back. “I think you need to remind me that I have the perfect man at home and shouldn’t be playing the field anymore.”
“Is Angie in her room?” His voice turned up hopefully on the end.
I buried my face in the crook of his shoulder. “Napping very deeply. She’s making those little puffs of breath that she does when we just can’t wake her.”
“There is a God.” Big Evan picked me up and carried me to the bathroom instead of the bed, which worked out quite well to remove the sweat of the day from him and the construction dust and stink of vamp and unfamiliar magics off of me.
* * *
When Jane got to the house my hair was still damp, but I was clean—very, very clean—and I was dressed in a T-shirt and a fitted denim shift with full skirt and deep, tucked pockets. I don’t think Big Evan and I fooled her any, because she shook her head and smiled that small smile while looking back and forth between us. I had the feeling she thought we were cute, but at least she wasn’t the teasing type.