by Mindy Klasky
“I’ll call you when we’re through, Jeanette!”
She was gone before I could say anything else. Time for call number two, then. Gran answered on the first ring.
“So, I think I figured it out,” I said, without preamble.
“Figured out what, dear?”
“Why you had me move everyone into the house.”
“And?”
“I had to know them, inside and out. All their faults, but also the perfection of their power. Without barriers. Without walls.”
Her laugh was amused. “The working went well, then?”
“Perfectly. Clara helped.”
“So I gathered. She phoned me this morning, right before she headed out to wash her hair in a waterfall, or something like that.”
“Something like that.” I rolled my eyes.
“She was quite excited. Said she’d been planning something for months. How did she phrase it? ‘It was just like Jeanette’s job at the Peabridge, lending books to other libraries. Witches lending power.’”
Interlibrary loan. My mother had compared her magical assistance to an age-old tradition in the library world. I said to Gran, “I didn’t think Clara paid any attention to the work I did at the Peabridge.”
“You’d be surprised, dear. She’s quite tickled with the notion of having an Affiliated Institution with your Academy.”
And in that moment, basking in sunshine and content with the world, I suspected Clara would continue to surprise me, all for the good. Gran and I chatted for a few more minutes, and I promised to come down and see her sometime during the next week.
When I hung up, I saw gleaming letters on the phone: Message Waiting. Who knew how long the message had been sitting there? I’d ignored the phone for ages. I dialed up voicemail, fully expecting to hear some telemarketer, some transparent plea for money. Instead, Melissa’s voice danced over the line. “Okay, Jane. I’ve called three times, and you aren’t picking up, but I can’t wait any longer. You’re fired as my maid of honor.”
My heart thudded into my throat.
“Rob and I are at the D.C. courthouse, waiting for a Justice of the Peace. Next time we talk, I’ll be a married woman.”
I cut off the message and dialed Melissa’s number, but it cut over to voicemail immediately. “You know what to do,” said my best friend’s laughing voice. “But don’t hold your breath for a call back. I’m on my honeymoon. And if this is Mom, I’m sorry. No, I’m not. We’ll talk about it when I get back.”
Well, I wasn’t going to interrupt her honeymoon with a phone call. I texted her a quick, “Congratulations!” and then I shook my head, thinking about how many contracts she and Rob had broken. Caterers, silhouette artists, hot air balloons…. Oh well. He was a lawyer. He’d plow through the paperwork once they got home.
Paperwork. I suddenly flashed on the documents David had taken from the Court. I saw them stacked in the Allen Cask, the instant before the Watchers made them disappear. I heard Pitt’s threats, his shouted accusations against David.
And suddenly, I couldn’t wait one second longer to see David. I had to touch him, had to confirm that he was safe from all harm. I moved without conscious thought, across the lawn, through the woods, back to the lake where so much had happened the night before.
He was standing on the dock, as I’d known he would be. Spot whirled as I approached, came bounding down the planks. I scratched the dog’s ears thoroughly before I went to look in the water.
David stepped aside as I approached, but his hand found mine without effort. His fingers laced between mine as I surveyed the results of our working. By daylight, the improvement was even more apparent than it had been the night before. The matted duckweed was gone, as if it had never clogged the surface. The sickly stench of rot was only a memory. Small fish kissed the uprights of the dock, and sunlight rippled over pebbles on the bottom.
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“It hasn’t been this clear in years.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. With all the rain, mud should be stirred up.”
He squeezed my fingers. “It’s magic.”
“Like the clean kitchen this morning? I assume you’re responsible for that?”
“I run a full service operation.” He grinned. “Speaking of which…”
He pulled his free hand from his pocket. On his palm was a diamond ring—an emerald cut, perfect in its simplicity. The platinum band gleamed in the sunlight.
“I wanted to do this months ago, on the Fourth of July. But then…” Before either of us could dwell on what had happened that night, he closed the distance between us. “Jane Madison, will you marry me?”
His eyes were laughing. The sun picked out the silver glints at his temples. His fingers were warm around mine, and I could feel the steady drumbeat of his heart. I caught my breath to prolong the perfect moment.
And then I pulled him close and kissed him. I was trembling, shivering with surprise, with happiness, with the aftermath of exhaustion from the night before. He pulled me close and anchored me, steadying me on my feet as I leaned into him. When we finally pulled apart, he said, “I take it that’s a yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
We both laughed as he slipped the ring onto my finger. But then, I caught his hands in both of mine. “Hecate’s Court won’t like this.”
“Hecate’s Court will have to manage.”
I set my palm against the firm line of his jaw. “We shouldn’t do anything to provoke them. Not with Pitt’s accusations out there.”
He held my concerned gaze. “We’ll deal with Pitt together. If it comes to that.”
He made it sound so simple. So easy. But he only spoke the truth. We would deal with Pitt together. We already had, solving the puzzle of the documents, binding them in the Cask. We’d dealt with everything together—the best parts of launching the magicarium and the worst.
I leaned in and kissed him again, and now I was steady on my feet. He pulled me closer, reaching with his warder’s magic to tug on the bond between us. Laughing, I answered with a flick of witchy power.
The sun was low on the horizon before we found our way back to the peace and quiet of the farmhouse.
THANK YOU!
THANK YOU FOR reading Single Witch’s Survival Guide! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please help other readers find this book.
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And as a small thank you for all of your support, please read on for special bonus materials!
SNEAK PEEK: FRIGHT COURT
JANE MADISON AND her fellow witches are not the only supernatural creatures who live and work near Washington, D.C. In fact, there are a number of otherworldly beings who inhabit Fright Court. And here’s your chance to read the first chapter of that novel, absolutely free!
* * *
AS I WATCHED Judge Robert DuBois drink a steaming glass of blood, I realized that my new job wasn’t going to be the usual nine to five.
This couldn’t be happening to me. I couldn’t be sitting in the courtroom for the District of Columbia Night Court, watching an actual vampire devour a midnight snack. I couldn’t be staring at suddenly-apparent fangs, at jet-black eyes in a whey-pale face, at a cruel and commanding supernatural jurist, where a mousy human judge had sat mere moments before.
It looked like my dream job, Court Clerk for the District of Columbia Night Court, was going to leave a little something to be desired.
“James,” Judge DuBois snapped. “Do we have a problem with Ms. Anderson?”
My boss stood at at
tention beside me. In his impeccable dark suit, Mr. Morton looked every bit the Director of Security for the Night Court. “No, Your Honor. No problem at all.”
But we did have a problem. A huge one—gaping in the center of the courtroom floor. The red-headed Amazon of a bailiff, Eleanor Owens, had pressed some hidden lever on the courtroom wall, and the sleek marble tiles started to slide back, folding away silently, one beneath another. An iron railing rose up from the emptiness below. Stairs gleamed as they marched into the darkness, and a metallic clang announced some door opening far below.
Eleanor’s impressive display of violet eyeshadow glittered as she stepped away from the lever and intoned, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Night Court of the Eastern Empire, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. May Sekhmet watch over all proceedings here and render justice unto all.”
I barely had time to register the odd words before a woman walked up the shadowy stairs. Exquisitely dressed in a plum-colored suit, she was the living—or, I rapidly came to suspect—the undead image of a professional lady lawyer. She strode to the defense table and snapped open her briefcase.
A doddering old man followed behind her. Okay, he wasn’t actually doddering, and he was probably only fifty-five, but he looked fat and soft and stupid next to the woman. He lugged a heavy litigation bag, one of those oversized briefcases that attorneys use to cart around endless sheaves of paper. He grunted as he hefted the satchel onto the prosecution’s table.
Once both lawyers had settled into their places, Eleanor descended the stairs. My mind was reeling; I was twisting the coral ring on the middle finger of my right hand as if it could turn back time, could make everything normal again. I had only completed one year of law school, but my classes had certainly never prepared me for anything like this. Even my interview with Mr. Morton had seemed perfectly normal—he had glanced at my resumé, asked me a bunch of questions about the three dozen jobs I’d held over the past few years, nodded when I explained that I was good at organizing information. He’d accepted my writing sample, told me that he was looking at a couple of other candidates, and said that he’d be back in touch.
And three days later, I was hired.
Now, sitting in the courtroom, Mr. Morton leaned forward, as two heads came into view on the secret staircase, Eleanor’s and the defendant’s. Clever me—I realized that the slight guy with the white-blond hair and ice-blue eyes had to be the defendant, because a gleaming silver chain was strung between his feet. That, and the fact that he wore a baggy white prison uniform, along with dirty flip-flops.
Eleanor followed behind the guy, towering over him without regard to the sneer he directed at her. She hefted a length of silver chain in her left hand; the links stood out against her heavy amethyst bracelet. In her right hand, she held a wooden stick, the length of her forearm and the width of her wrist. It tapered down to a knife-sharp point.
The Night Court bailiff held a stake.
This had to be a joke—some sort of hazing for the new girl. Mr. Morton had read my resumé. He knew that I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Gothic literature in America—old horror stories, like Edgar Allan Poe. The courtroom staff must have decided to pull my leg.
Strike that. Judge DuBois didn’t look like the type of guy who would put up with courtroom pranks.
This was insane. They couldn’t be vampires. Vampires had no lungs. No beating hearts. I focused on Mr. Morton’s starched white shirt. As soon as I saw him take a breath, I could laugh at myself. I could say that I had been taken in by a strange series of coincidences, that I’d been a gullible fool.
But he didn’t breathe.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eleanor clump back to her place at the front of the bench. She proclaimed: “The matter of the Clans of the Eastern Empire versus Karl Schmidt, Judge Robert DuBois presiding.”
Mr. Morton still didn’t breathe.
The blond woman stood and announced, “Your Honor, we’d like to call our next witness, Ernst Brauer.”
No breathing yet.
Eleanor heaved herself toward the impossible stairs in the center of the courtroom, stood at attention as another man climbed those steps. Judge DuBois ordered Brauer to take the witness stand.
No breathing at all.
My head swam. My vision clouded, and I realized that I had to get out of that room. “I can’t— “ I started to say, and I staggered toward the courtroom doors, doors that I had watched Mr. Morton lock behind us, a mere half hour before.
“James!” Judge DuBois snapped, and my boss’s hand suddenly reached for my elbow.
“No!” I said, jerking my arm out of his reach.
“Sarah!” Mr. Morton shouted, and he blocked my way to the courtroom doors.
Before I could push past him, a snarl ripped the air—pure animal fury that shattered whatever formality remained in the courtroom. Judge DuBois slammed his gavel down, demanding order in his court. There was a clatter as the court reporter leaped to one side. Eleanor clutched her silver chain, and Mr. Morton grabbed at me again, closing his icy palm around my arm.
But none of it mattered. None of it made any difference.
Ernst Brauer crashed through the wooden gate that separated the active area of the courtroom from the spectators’ seats. He pounced on me, grabbing my hair and snapping my head back like a doll’s. I pounded at his chest, but I might as well have battled stone. His grip was stronger than I’d ever imagined an attacker’s could be. I tried to turn sideways, to pull back toward Mr. Morton, toward safety. Brauer laughed, though, and he forced me hard against his chest, tugging at my hair with enough force to rattle my jaws.
Brauer growled deep in his throat, sounds that might have been lost syllables, twisted words. “Strangle her,” I thought he said. I stared into his face. I could see his red-rimmed eyes, flaming like molten lava. I could see his cracked lips curl back in a snarl. I could see his incisors glinting like a Rottweiler’s, descending even as I gaped.
I screamed as those teeth sank into my neck.
“Fire!” I shrieked. “Call 911!”
I’d taken a self-defense class in college. Some well-padded instructor had brainwashed me that onlookers were more likely to respond to warnings about fire than to everyday cries for help. The same burly guy had promised that twenty-five percent of attackers would be startled away by any loud shout.
Just my luck, Ernst Brauer wasn’t in the twenty-five percent.
Panic flooded my body; my heart clenched with enough force that my entire chest hurt. Barely able to remember my training, I scrabbled for Brauer’s fingers, bending them back until they broke like matchsticks.
In theory. There was no way that I was actually getting Brauer’s hands to move. His fingers might as well have been made of iron.
He snarled against my throat. I actually felt his lips curve back. Hot air rushed against my skin as an inhuman sound rattled out of him. The tiny hairs on my arms rose in primitive reaction—the creature who held me was a predator, and I was prey.
My stomach lurched as I heard the pop of his teeth puncturing my flesh. For one heartbeat, I knew that I was injured, knew that I was going to bleed, and then I gasped at the actual sting of the wound, like a hundred razor nicks all at once. My blood pumped out of my body, suctioned into his mouth. His tongue drove against the pulse point in the hollow beneath my jaw, urging the flow to quicken.
Frantic, I struggled to remember other self-defense techniques. I couldn’t balance in my idiotic new-job pumps; there was no way to get enough leverage to stomp on his insole, to bring my knee up into his groin. That left my hands. Not my own vulnerable fingers, my knuckles that had never delivered a real punch in my life. Instead, I bent my right hand back at my wrist, exposing the hard heel and driving toward my attacker’s solar plexus. I tried to push through his body, to force every last gasp of air from his lungs so that he had no choice but to drop me while he caugh
t his breath.
Great idea. If, you know, the guy actually needed to breathe.
If I had any doubt left about the creature that was attacking me, any suspicion that he was actually human, that I’d made some fanciful mistake by thinking he was a vampire, his reaction to my punch destroyed it. Any human man would have gulped in air after my blow. Any human man would have loosened his grip, if only for a second.
This creature only pulled me closer. He bent my neck at a steeper angle, slicing deeper with one razor fang to follow the rich lode of my jugular. I screamed as my blood began to flow faster.
Another cry matched mine. A bellow, actually. Suddenly, Eleanor was beside us, and Brauer’s fangs ripped from my neck, tearing more of my flesh as he threw back his head to howl. Taking full advantage of my unexpected freedom, I staggered toward the oaken courtroom doors, toward safety.
I wanted to look away. I wanted not to see the creature before me, not to see his pointed teeth glinting with my blood. But I could not stop watching. I could not even blink as Eleanor wrestled Brauer to the ground, twisting her silver chain around his forehead, dropping it to his neck. She pulled the links tight, snapping them against each other with a vehemence that would have caused anyone—human or vampire—to wince.
The silver, though, made Brauer do more than wince. Once again, he screamed—this time in utter agony. I was almost bowled over by the stench of burning flesh. My attacker fell to his knees, slamming against the marble floor with enough force that my own legs ached. The motion knocked him silent, and I realized that he must have passed out. My suspicion was confirmed when he slumped to one side, collapsing in a heap at the toes of Eleanor’s uniform boots.
In the sudden silence, the only sound that I could hear was my pounding heart. I raised a hand to my throat, catching my breath between my teeth as my torn flesh stung, as I realized just how much damage Brauer had done. I was terrified to move my fingers, too afraid to speak, to do anything that might make my wounds even worse.