The Water Witch

by Juliet Dark

  NINE

  Well, I really messed that up, I thought as I pulled out of the Olsens’ driveway. How could I have lost myself so completely that I injured Ann? But that’s what had happened: that first rush of power had felt like a flame rushing through my veins, burning a path to those strange images of caves and stone circles and that mysterious figure holding the curved knife. That last image had felt somehow … intimate. And terrifying. I shuddered, tasting fear in my mouth. I forced my mind away from the moment, back to the sunlit country road in front of me, the old stone bridge and the sign announcing the Undine …

  “Shit!” I swore, turning into the same driveway for the second time today. I had been so busy reliving the circle that I’d gone back the wrong way again.

  I wrenched the gear stick into reverse and backed directly into a pothole. I could hear the undercarriage of my less-than-a-year-old Fit grating against gravel. I looked warily toward the house, sure the sound would have aroused the owner, but the house kept still in its enchanted silence. I looked back over my shoulder … and was blinded by a flash of gold sunlight just as I’d been last time …

  Only last time the sun had been on the east side of the house, now it was low over the west side. What, then, was making that flash of light? I tried staring directly into the glare but couldn’t see anything. Oddly, I found that I didn’t mind staring into that blinding light. In fact, the longer I looked into it, the more reluctant I was to drive away. The trill of moving water and the wind chimes beckoned me to stay. I tore my eyes away and looked back at the house. Still quiet. Even the smoke had vanished. Maybe I’d imagined it before, and the cabin really was abandoned.

  I put the car in park and turned off the ignition. Without the noise of the engine, the rush of water filled the air—a soothing sound that could lull a person to sleep. And yet I felt wide awake. The light from the water had recharged me, much like the energy of the circle.

  I got out of the car, closing the door as quietly as I could, and walked down to the water, following a stone staircase that had been set into the steep bank. The riverside had been shored up by beautiful stone walls. Crystals and round river stones were set between square blocks of granite. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the river accessible from the house, but judging from the layers of moss and wildflowers growing between the rocks, the work had been done a long time ago. Unlike the house, though, which was suffering signs of decay and neglect, the stone walls and stairs were lovingly—if eccentrically—maintained. Pots of fragrant herbs lined the steps and small clay figures and candles sat in niches inside the walls. At the bottom of the steps was a rustic bench made of twisted birch branches. I ran my hand along the wood, which had been polished to the smoothness of bone, until my fingers grazed something carved into the seatback—a pair of initials intertwined in a heart: L & Q. The initials were nearly as smooth as the rest of the wood, worn down by someone’s touch.

  I looked from the bench toward the stream. The flash of gold was still there, a bright spot under the water refracted a hundred times into gold waves by the moving water. Staring into it, I felt the warmth I had when lying under the willow tree with Liam in Faerie, the release I’d felt when the circle had joined hands and the gold light had moved through us. Both were moments when I’d been exposed to Aelvesgold, and Soheila had said that they sometimes found traces of Aelvesgold in the Undine.

  Well, there was only one way to find out. I took off my sandals and waded into the stream. It was cold but, given the heat of the day, not unpleasantly so. The bottom was covered with wide, mossy stones, not, thankfully, gooey mud. I carefully inched forward, exploring the surface of the rocky bottom with my toes, trying not to think about snakes. The current wrapped around my ankles, then my calves, like silk scarves seductively pulling me deeper into the water.

  I stood a foot or so from the source of the gold light. It was so strong that I was now sure that it was Aelvesgold. The circle needed Aelvesgold to cure Brock … I needed it to gain enough power to keep the door open. And, after all, it was my fault the circle had wasted their last reserve of the stuff.

  I took another step forward … and noticed the water was warmer. Looking down, I saw that I was standing in a small pool of amber water. I wriggled my toes, which had gone a little numb in the cold water, and felt the warm current moving up my legs, spreading a delicious sensation of well-being throughout my body. It was like getting a foot massage while drinking a champagne cocktail. I squatted down, not caring that the water soaked the hem of my dress, and reached my hand into the core of the gold light. For all I knew I might have been sticking my hand into a bear trap, but I no longer cared. The light was tingling in my veins, fizzing my nerve endings, and massaging the pleasure centers in my brain. This felt almost as good as when I’d made love to Liam under the willow tree in Faerie yesterday. Maybe if I could grab whatever was making this light, I wouldn’t miss that quite so much.

  My fingers wrapped around something round and hard. It was half sunken in the mud, but I pulled it out with a satisfying plock. I dimly recalled Liz saying that Aelvesgold could be dangerous to handle, but I couldn’t stop myself. Lifting the stone out of the water, I cradled it in the palm of my hand. It fit perfectly, like an egg in a nest. It was, in fact, egg-shaped and golden—like the proverbial golden goose egg—and glowed as if it were on fire. It didn’t hurt me.

  Because you were meant to have it.

  The voice in my head didn’t sound entirely like my own. But I agreed completely. I was meant to possess this stone. I started to slip it into my pocket … and heard the click of metal behind me.

  “That’s not yours to take,” a low, gravelly voice growled. “Stand up slowly and hand her over.”

  I stood up as slowly as I could, gripping the stone hard in my fist. I had images of throwing it at my assailant to knock them out and then grabbing the stone back and running. The person behind me was wrong. The stone was mine to take.

  But, as I surmised from the cold metal rod pressing between my shoulder blades, the person behind me had a gun.

  I turned around, expecting some hillbilly he-man in hunting camo, but found instead a woman the size of a fourth-grader with a face like a shriveled apple and a rifle more than half her size held in crabbed and trembling hands.

  “I was only taking a stone,” I said, in the slow, gentle tones I’d use to calm a nervous animal.

  “Thief! Trespasser!” she snapped back. “Hand her over, I say.” She nudged my right hand—still curled around the stone—with her rifle. She held the rifle in her left hand, balancing it against her hip. Without the right hand to steady it, the rifle shook like a leaf in the wind. In fact, all eighty or so pounds of the frail, elderly woman were shaking like aspen leaves. One good shove …

  What was I thinking? She was an old woman and she was right. I was trespassing and the stone, no matter how much it felt like it belonged to me—didn’t.

  I held out my arm, the stone heavy in my hand, and started to step toward her so that she wouldn’t have to move closer to me. I didn’t like the idea of her tripping and shooting me by accident. When I stepped forward my foot landed on a slick surface below the water. My balance wavered, my arms pin-wheeled in the air, and then the sky was whirling above me. My last thought was that I really ought to use my arms to brace my fall, but that would mean letting go of the stone, and I wasn’t willing to do that.

  When I came to, I was lying on damp green moss, looking up into a kaleidoscope of waving lights. Bright flashes darted over my head. Fish, I thought, strangely bright tropical fish for an inland river. I must be in Faerie.

  But then my vision cleared and I noticed that the bright flashing lights were pieces of tin and glass hanging from strings. The damp green moss was an ancient settee which smelled like cat pee. I tried to sit up and my head began to pound. I touched the back of my head and found a hard knot the size and shape of a goose egg …

  Or of the Aelvesgold stone.

  “
It’s here,” a voice said. “You held on to it when you went down. Damned thing would have gotten you drowned if I hadn’t dragged you out of the river. That’s what it does to you, the Aelvesgold. You only had it in your hand a minute and you’d have been willing to crack your head open and drown in the river rather than let it go. Here, put this on your fool head.”

  The woman handed me a piece of flannel wrapped around a chunk of ice. I placed it gingerly against the bump and looked at her. She sat in a rocking chair in front of a woodstove, limned in murky light that turned her silver hair greenish gold. In the shadowy light, her face looked younger than it had outside. She was wearing a red wool cardigan appliquéd with snowmen over a plaid flannel shirt over red long johns and a long wool skirt. A heavy outfit for a summer day, but then old people were often cold. Plastic sheeting was taped over most of the windows to keep out drafts and a fire was roaring in the woodstove. The room itself looked like it was melting. Long strips of wallpaper hung from the walls, revealing multiple layers of floral patterns. Plaster was curling off the ceiling, and the wide plank floorboards were buckled and wavy. There was a scrabbling noise coming from the ceiling that I suspected might be mice.

  “You dragged me out of the water?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t let you drown, even if you were trying to steal my Aelvestone.”

  Aelvestone. I liked the sound of that. I looked around the room for it.

  There was no shortage of stones. Piled on every surface were smooth, rounded river stones, along with pieces of polished driftwood and other flotsam and jetsam that I imagined the old woman had salvaged from the river: shards of broken glass that had been worn milky by their tumble over the rocks, bits of rusted metal twisted by the currents, and enough broken china to make a tea service for twelve. But no Aelvestone.

  “I have her safe, or safe as can be. The Aelvesgold works its way with folks—different ways with different folks—but never for good. Most regular folk don’t see it.” She leaned forward in her rocker and squinted at me. Her face did look younger than it had before. “But you ain’t regular folk, are you?”

  “I have a feeling neither are you,” I replied, wincing at the sharp pain in my head as I tried to sit up straighter. “My name’s Cailleach McFay. I work at the college. And you are …?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” She laughed, which turned into a hacking cough. She spat into a cloudy-looking mason jar and wiped her mouth on the cuff of her flannel shirt. “You must be new to the town not to have heard the story of Lura Trask.”

  “Trask?” The name was familiar. I searched my brain until I recalled the story Soheila had told me in the woods about the fisherman who had fallen in love with an undine. “Are you Sullivan Trask’s daughter?”

  She made a hoarse noise of agreement and spit into the jar again.

  “Then your mother …” Lura gave me a sharp warning look, but I persevered. “Your mother was an undine.”

  Lura scowled. “And what if she was? What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing—it’s just that I didn’t know that undines could have … human children.”

  “How do you know I’m human?” she asked with a wicked grin. Then when I didn’t answer, she slapped her knee and guffawed. “I reckon I’m half human, but say …” She looked at me suspiciously. “How do you know about the undines in the first place?”

  “I helped the other undines find the way into Faerie yesterday.”

  She leaned back in her chair and looked out the only window that wasn’t covered with plastic. It gave a glimpse of the river flowing fast and glinting in the late afternoon sunlight. I must have been unconscious for some time.

  “I heard them going,” she said, staring into the fire. “I knew it was the day … and that they had to go …”

  “They were your sisters,” I said, putting together the bloodlines and realizing that if Lura really was the daughter of the undine who had seduced Sullivan Trask then she must be close to a hundred years old. “Of course you’d miss them.”

  She made a harsh noise. “Miss them? Hardly. They kept me up half the nights with their singing. They’d swim down here and tangle my fishing lines and steal my bait. Silly, mindless creatures. Good riddance, I say.”

  She got up and grabbed an iron poker. For a moment I was afraid she was going to hit me with it, but she shoved it in the woodstove instead, stirring up a flurry of sparks that flew into the air and singed the drooping wallpaper. It was a wonder that she hadn’t already burned down the place.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know then that there might not be any more undines coming here. The Grove wants to close the door …”

  Lura turned on me, the poker raised menacingly. “They can’t do that! The undines must return to this river to spawn or they’ll die out.”

  “I thought they were silly, mindless creatures,” I pointed out, “and that you were glad to see them gone. Why do you care if there aren’t any more, especially …”

  “Especially as I’m not going to be around much longer?” She lowered the poker and gave the fire one more angry stab. Sitting back down, she looked into the flames and grew silent. The reflection of the firelight gave her skin the momentary flush of youth and I saw that she’d once been pretty. “I’m not afraid to die,” she said after a while, “but to think I’m the last of my kind … Well, that’s not the way I want to leave this world, even if it hasn’t always been a world that’s been kind to me.”

  I wondered what the world had done to her that she’d chosen to live alone in this decaying house with only her half-human sisters for company. Looking at her, small and worn down as one of the river stones she collected, I felt the weight of all the years she had spent here alone. This house seemed infected with sadness, as if the wallpaper and plaster were peeling under its burden. A small, mean voice inside me sang, This is what happens to you when you don’t love anyone.

  “Well, I’m going to try to stop them along with a circle of … friends.”

  “Ha! A circle, eh? You must mean them witches and fairies? They don’t know what they’re doing most days. They come to me sometimes pretending they want my advice when all they really want is my Aelvesgold.”

  “You mean you have more Aelvesgold than that stone?”

  “Why would I tell you?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Hey,” I said, holding up my hands. “I just learned about the stuff. My friends said the only reliable supply of it came from Faerie.”

  Lura snorted and spat in the mason jar. “Your friends are ignorant. When an undine lays her eggs, she lays an Aelvestone with ’em to keep ’em safe till they hatch. The one you found must’ve been with the undines you brought over to Faerie, so it belonged to my sisters. Why should I share it?”

  “Because we need the Aelvesgold to give us the power to keep the door open,” I said.

  Lura screwed up her face, taking away any remnant of the beauty I’d just glimpsed. She reached her hand into her cardigan pocket and pulled out the Aelvestone. I caught my breath at the sight of it and had to restrain myself from leaping up and grabbing it. She leaned forward and held it up between her thumb and forefinger, as if teasing me with it.

  “If I give you this, how do I know that you’d use it to keep the door open? How do I know you won’t use it to close the door?”

  “Because I’m a doorkeeper,” I said without thinking. “It’s my job to open the door. If the Grove closes it forever …” I thought of Soheila and Diana being forced to chose between this world and Faerie. I thought of Liz growing old and dying without the benefit of Aelvesgold. I thought of never seeing Liam again … which shouldn’t matter because I’d already made my peace with not seeing him again. So why did my whole body feel as if it had been hollowed out? I think it was that hollowness that Lura saw in my eyes, perhaps because it was the same emptiness I’d seen in hers.

  She nodded, spat again, tossed the stone up in the air, and caught it. My eyes followed its progress like a dog watching a
bone. She tossed the stone to me. I wasn’t the best catch in the world (Annie used to call me Butterfingers when we played softball together), but I snatched the stone out of the air as if I were Roger Maris catching a fly ball. As if I had known it was coming. As if it belonged to me.

  “See if that don’t give you enough power to hold the door open,” she said. “See if it don’t open up a whole passel of doors for you. Some of those,” she added with a wicked grin, “you just might want closed again.”

  TEN

  Before I left, Lura gave me a flannel cloth to wrap around the Aelvestone. “Don’t touch it any more than you have to,” she warned. “It gives great strength, but at a price.” It was exactly what Liz had told me.

  I looked closely at Lura as she stood beside my car in the late afternoon sunlight. She was staring at my right rear tire, stuck in a pothole. Her hair, which had seemed momentarily golden inside the house, was dull gray again, her face even more ancient-looking than when I’d first seen her. The Aelvestone had given her youth—and something else.

  “That’s how you were able to carry me out of the river,” I said. “You used the Aelvestone to give yourself strength.”

  In answer, she bent down and hooked a tiny hand around my rear bumper. She lifted the entire chassis to the left to clear the pothole. She let it down—a little less gently than was likely to be good for my suspension system—and straightened up, arching her back until it cracked.

  “Ah,” she said, “I haven’t used Aelvesgold in more than twenty years. I’d forgotten how it felt … It’s probably added a few months onto my life, but I’ll pay for it. Remember that. Only use as much as you have to.”

  I told her I would and promised that I’d do my best to stop the Grove from closing the door. I started to thank her for saving my life, but she spat on the ground and waved me away. Maybe half-undines didn’t like to be thanked any more than brownies did.