Bump (A Witchlight Novel)

by Jaime Munn

  Hadrian beckoned me closer. The air was shockingly cold within the bedroom. As I approached the werewolf alpha it grew colder still. I realised that the spirit was hardening in the air like ice captured growing through time lapse photography. He was becoming flesh, or as much as a spirit could. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Hadrian was powerful. Still it did. It sent a chill of fear down my spine, colder even than the icy grip that the spirit held over the room.

  He offered a solid hand to me when I came to a stop an arm’s reach away from him. Hesitantly I took it and almost gasped aloud at the cold feel of it. I felt the strength of him flow through me, but no visions filtered through my mind. Hadrian’s flesh was a blank canvas. Even his animating spirit had not yet had time to permeate it with a history to match his soul. He was older though than perhaps anyone had guessed. I could feel it in the air, like the clash of swords and the wind whistling through the stones of a castle.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” he said.

  His voice was deep and strong. Not rough but smooth and commanding. It would be so easy to give in to the authority that rang through every word. I thought that it was easy to see why even someone as strong willed as Cleo would bend her knee to him. He made me think of ancient kings of the kind only found in romance novels; noble and strong and virtuous.

  “Welcome to Heartwood, Ms Hayes.”

  I stammered a thank you, unable to control my tongue. Hadrian seemed satisfied though. He let go of my hand and turned to lean over Sofia.

  “The spirit is twisted through her like hastily wound yarn. It isn’t a strong spirit. I could simply tug it free of Sofia, but it would rip through her soul like hot wire through wax.” He glanced up at me. “I can’t help Sofia. I would only bring her harm to try. The spirit will not speak with me. I hope that you can do more.”

  He straightened, turning away from the bed and the sleeping werewolf. He was leaving I realised. He paused as he spotted F.C. licking his paws in the door way to the bedroom.

  He didn’t say anything, but glanced from me to F.C. and raised his brows. Then he nodded to Cleo and left the room.

  I found my voice again.

  “He’s in a hurry.”

  Cleo shrugged.

  “He’s spent a lot of energy becoming flesh to greet our witch,” I gulped at the possessive pronoun. “I guess he wanted to impress you,” she gave me a quick smile, showing just a hint of teeth. “He’ll not waste that energy now. He’s gone to find Sebastian.”

  It took me a moment to join the dots. Perhaps a sexually frustrated teenager would have gotten there quicker. I nodded and moved closer to Sofia. I couldn’t let myself dwell on the wonder of meeting the ghost alpha of the queer wolves when the woman I wanted by my side was the victim of possession.

  I sat on the bed beside her and slowly unwound the spell of sleep, spinning a gentle restraining spell to keep the spirit from fighting back or taking a chance on escape. I left her head free. I only thought then that Hadrian hadn’t been able to speak with the spirit of Daudie Schalko because of the spell I’d put him under. I shrugged. It wouldn’t do calling him away from his lover, not unless I couldn’t free Sofia on my own.

  “Hello, Daudie,” I said, when Sofia opened her eyes.

  The spirit widened the werewolf’s amber eyes a moment, then seemed to take in my apparent cool composure as a sign that I had done my homework while it was sleeping. It sighed.

  “Can we just skip to the end?” I asked, hoping that the ghost of Daudie Schalko couldn’t hear my heart hammering in my chest.

  The spirit said nothing. It wasn’t game over quite yet then, though I still hoped that the spirit would go quietly.

  “I imagine that somehow after you died you got a little lost and you stuck close to Jannie’s side. Frankly I don’t know how you stomached it. He may have started out life just a little bad but he ended it a whole lot of evil.”

  Daudie grimaced at me with Sofia’s face.

  “He never liked that name. Maybe if they’d named us Jannie and Daudie, instead of Daudie and Jannie, he wouldn’t have been as bad.”

  “It seems to me that whatever he called himself, he still ended up killing,” I replied.

  I kept my tone tightly controlled, not wanting to ignite any emotions within the spirit that would make it more resistant to a friendly exorcism. I didn’t have the perfect calm for an unfriendly one and I doubted I would ever have it. You try exorcism when the victim is your lover. If you tell me you found an ocean of inner calm, I’ll call you a liar and a fraud.

  “It wasn’t all his fault,” Daudie said defending his brother. I imagined that he had done a lot of that in his short life.

  “It wasn’t not his fault,” I said gently. “I saw his first mistake. I saw it lead him down a bad path, Daudie. He chose that path, one small step at a time. He started off human, but he ended his life a monster.”

  Daudie shed a tear down Sofia’s left cheek. He couldn’t lift her hand to brush it away because of the restraining spell, so I did it for him.

  “He tried to be good,” the spirit said sadly.

  “He tried to be you. He stopped playing with fire but the fire was already inside of him.”

  It was a primitive way of describing how on the night of the fire something ethereal had wakened inside of Jannie Schalko. His spark had been fanned to life. That supernatural energy had twisted through him and bonded with his secret nature. It had made him an incubus, but Jannie had made himself a monster.

  “It was my fault,” Daudie said quietly. “I didn’t leave.”

  I thought another piece of the puzzle fell into place then.

  “Did you possess your brother that night?”

  Daudie looked away, but he answered my question.

  “He came back into the house, into the fire, when no one came out. He couldn’t hear me, he couldn’t see me. I wanted to save him.”

  “How long,” I asked.

  “A few days maybe,” Daudie said.

  “So Jannie didn’t choose to be Daudie Schalko. When people asked for a name, you gave them your own.”

  Daudie nodded.

  It made sense now why an ordinary boy had turned into an incubus. His trauma had woken the supernatural inside of him, possession had shaped it. Nature had fanned the fire into an inferno. It wasn’t all Daudie’s fault, but I had the feeling he’d stuck around since then because he felt responsible for what his brother had become. Being exonerated of blame wasn’t what he wanted.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” I said and reached out a hand to lay on Sofia’s shoulder. “You can’t let the past control you.”

  “Why not? I’m dead. It’s not like I have a future.”

  I scowled at Daudie.

  “Not here you don’t, but the ever after…”

  “What waits in the ever after?” Daudie prompted. Sofia’s voice had an ugly whine in it.

  I knew that the spirit’s mood was turning. He knew what to expect from my response, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t gone there yet and it’s pretty much a one way ticket.”

  “So what makes you think anything waits the dead? What if we just disappear?”

  I wondered if it had been fear all along that had kept Daudie Schalko trapped.

  “If there’s nothing more after death, why are you still here?” I asked him gently. “It makes no sense for the spirit to survive the death of the body if there’s no ever after. There’s something waiting for you, Daudie Schalko. Your family is waiting for you. They’ve waited long enough, don’t you think?”

  He was silent a moment. I wondered if he had chosen not to hear me, not to reason through my words. I couldn’t exorcise him from Sofia, I thought. There was a growing sense of panic inside of me. Then Daudie looked up at me through Sofia’s eyes, her face etched with his sadness.

  “I can’t go,” he said. “I used up all the light that takes people there.”


  He was a young boy I reminded myself. He didn’t know much of life and he didn’t know much of death either. He had become trapped in the world of the living through fear and a silly mistake. It had probably kept him here ever since.

  Though he’d missed his first chance at a ride into the ever after, his spark would have gradually restored itself. But Daudie hadn’t known that and had probably tapped into that power over the years and bleed it out so that it never really reached the levels needed to propel the spirit into the ever after.

  “You can always go,” I told him.

  I didn’t think telling him that he’d just need to wait a few years for his spark to trickle back to fullness would help. Like his brother, I thought, Daudie Schalko had become a serial possessor. I was almost certain that between Sofia and Jannie, Daudie had practiced a path similar to his brother.

  In a way the spirit was probably as much an incubus, though less destructive than his demented brother. I raised a hand, held it cupped, and filled it with energy. It was pure magic drawn up through my reserves and untainted by my will.

  “Is that your light?” Daudie asked. I wondered if he was asking if he was taking my ticket to the ever after and if that worried him.

  “It’s magic,” I told him.

  He had known enough about witchcraft to mark my door with a curse. I wondered if I wasn’t underestimating Daudie Schalko. He’d not spent his death isolated completely from the world of the living. Somewhere along the line he’d learned a little about the supernatural. I imagined that his brother becoming part of that community had helped.

  “If you want it, it’s yours.”

  “What will it do?”

  I thought he knew the answer already.

  “It’s your ticket to the ever after. Don’t miss this ride, Daudie.” I wanted to add you may not get another one as a push but something held me back. Maybe it was the thought of lying to him or maybe I just didn’t know the spirit well enough to know if a push would make him lash out or submit.

  Nothing happened for a while. Cleo and I held our breath. The room seemed unnaturally quiet, then Daudie Schalko untangled himself from Sofia and rose from the bed a pale wraith of a young boy.

  He looked exactly as the twins had looked in the photograph in the newspaper article that Cleo had shown me. Cleo took a step back as the spirit stood before me. He peered into my cupped hand. There was a momentary shift in his expression towards fear, before he steeled himself against it. He looked up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” his muted voice, young but hollow in death, was almost too soft to hear.

  Then before I could say anything at all to him, he reached a hand into the energy I had summoned for him. It ran like an alchemy of light through him and his spirit was rocketed into the ever after.

  It sounds quite dramatic, but really what it amounted to, was the spirit faded away until not even a glimmer of his presence remained. I wondered if he’d been apologising for what he’d done to Sofia or for everything since the night his brother had set their house on fire.

  It didn’t really matter.

  “Sofia?” I leaned over her, staring anxiously into her eyes; waiting for a spark of animation, of recognition. Cleo crossed to the other side of the bed.

  “Sofy are you back?”

  Sofia blinked. She looked from me to Cleo. Then in a panicked voice she said, “I can’t feel my body.”

  I wanted to laugh in relief, only Sofia’s obvious fear prevented me.

  “Blame your witch,” Cleo told her.

  She turned her wide eyes to me.

  I held up a hand.

  “Don’t worry, it’s just a binding spell.” I pulled it apart quickly and easily, unravelling it like knitting. “It’s gone now,” I told her when the spell was broken.

  “Is it?” Sofia asked, sitting up. She pulled her legs against her body to hug them.

  She was asking me about the incubus spirit. I nodded.

  “He’s gone to the ever after.”

  I reached a hand out to stroke her arm. She broke her hold of her legs to fling herself against me. I thought I heard a sob break her lips. I wondered just how aware of her possession she’d been.

  Cleo cleared her throat.

  “I’ll give you some time,” she said, excusing herself. She glanced at me, “We’ll talk later.”

  I wondered if our little reunion had sparked a need to find out if I really could help her commune with the white wolf. She closed the door behind her.

  F.C. jumped up on the bed and made himself comfortable after giving Sofia a brief examination. He made sure to give us plenty of space though.

  I held onto my werewolf, soothing her. I thought back to the confident woman who’d walked into my life and wondered if I’d broken her.

  “Sofia?”

  She held onto me tightly. For a werewolf that’s very tight indeed. I hoped I didn’t suffocate before she regained herself.

  “You wouldn’t think I was a werewolf would you?” Sofia murmured, her head resting on my chest. “I’m falling to pieces after a little incident of possession. It doesn’t sound very werewolfy does it?”

  “What, being a werewolf turns you into an instant superhero?”

  She gave a small laugh.

  “That’s what they say in the books, superhero or supervillan.”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I said suddenly and she squeezed me a little tighter. “Sofia, the books are right about werewolf strength,” I wheezed and she let up on her grip.

  “Sorry.” She lay back down and pulled me onto her. “Is this better?”

  “Much,” I said and we kissed.

  Her breath tasted a little stale, but I didn’t mind. She was warm against me and her amber eyes were fever bright. I caught a glimpse of F.C. jumping off the bed as though he didn’t need more of a hint to make himself scarce.

  I felt a little guilty thinking about Erica as Sofia’s fingers undid the buttons of my shirt, but then it all vanished as we kissed again and passion woke like fire in my veins.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  We lay in bed together after and I told Sofia what had happened since the coffee shop. She wasn’t surprised that we were both in the city, in Heartwood. I guessed that she had smelled as much in the air the moment she’d resurfaced. She didn’t press me for details about what I’d seen in the memories of the incubus, but let me gloss over that part of the tale. She didn’t believe me that Cleo really had spoken so many words to me though. She pouted at me when I insisted she had.

  “So you’ve finished the charm then,” she said finally when the tale was done, choosing to focus on something romantic instead of all the violence and sadness threaded through my little recounting of events.

  I smiled at her and nodded.

  “Can I see it,” she asked eagerly. I wondered if she would have been as excited about it had the week been less adventurous for the both of us.

  I had to search amongst our discarded clothing for my handbag and fished the pendant out from it. It felt warm to the touch and I caught a whisper of another mind. It focused on me instantly, sensing my presence even before I was aware of the charm’s power, then it blocked me out as neatly as excising a malignant tumour. I blinked.

  “It’s beautiful,” Sofia reached out to touch it. Again there was a sense of another mind. Again it assessed the contact quickly, but this time it didn’t block us out. It seemed to latch onto Sofia’s mental signature. I wondered if werewolf minds had a scent as much as their bodies did.

  “Bella!” Sofia exclaimed.

  Though there wasn’t exactly a voice I could distinguish from the mind of the white wolf, I did feel a response from her. Recognition and joy bubbled out from the werewolf doomed to forever be bound in her animal form. I felt her searching for something in that connection between us. I didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was. The white wolf was seeking her lover. I knew that Cleo would have her happy ending at least in this little tale.

  �
�We have to give the charm to Cleo,” Sofia said rising from the bed. The moment her hands left the charm, the mind on the other end of the connection retreated, but this time it didn’t block me out.

  I didn’t know her, but her isolation was a loud and depressing whisper that almost had me in tears. I couldn’t help but think about the other spell I thought I might be able to pull off. The white wolf caught that thread and her excitement and wonder was intoxicating. Briefly, I thought I heard her begging me to cast that spell. Whatever the price, she would pay.

  Sofia was dressing and urging me to do the same. Bella sensed it all through me and her mind retreated, as though she was saying goodbye. I laid the charm down on the night stand beside the bed. Sofia tossed me my panties.

  “So do you always wear sexy underwear or were you hoping to get lucky today, Ms Hayes,” she teased.

  “I’ve scrutinised so many lingerie catalogues in my misspent youth, I figured I owed the companies who put them out a little loyalty and support,” I replied. Sofia laughed.

  I tried not to think about how we would deal with Erica and worst of all how we would break the news to Livia, but it wasn’t possible not to. My life was equal parts joy and sorrow right now. It was not an equilibrium that could hold. I could only hope that joy would win through in the end.

  As we dressed F.C. jumped up onto the bed from wherever he’d hidden himself away and stalked slowly towards the white wolf charm. He sniffed at it curiously. I wondered what would happen if he touched it. He seemed unwilling to do so, watching it with his all black eyes like there was something he could see that no one else could. I wondered what that might be, but he didn’t want to share it with me as I nudged him mentally.

  Sofia didn’t want to waste a minute in getting the charm to Cleo. She was urging us out the door the moment I put my last shoe on.