Their host shook his head. “I’m afraid there’s no one in my family that matches that description. Supernatural lore? Do you mean nonsense like wizards and vampires?”
“Well, kind of. Mythology and Celtic legends and, uh, time travel.” William was sounding less and less confident, as if the skepticism radiating from Mr. Marzavan was sapping his own belief in the weirdness they were going through.
“I don’t read much fiction,” said their host dismissively. “I come from a line of men of action. We haven’t much time for daydreaming; we’re too busy doing.”
William and Maddie exchanged a hopeless glance. “You must find retirement pretty dull, then,” said Maddie. “What do you do to fill the time now? I heard you do something with roses.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I’ve taken first prize at the Great Southeastern Flower Show two years running.” He got to his feet, and they had no choice but to follow suit. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be of assistance. Now, unless there’s anything else I can do—”
Maddie deliberately misinterpreted his cue. “Yes, we’d love to see your roses,” she said brightly. “It’s so kind of you to offer to give us a tour of your garden!”
Their host’s pale blue eyes, as prominent as ever, registered an instant of annoyance, but also a bit of the fanatic’s gleam. “There’s very little to see at this time of year, but if you’re certain… I do have a few strains that are still in bloom.”
“That sounds great,” said William, with false enthusiasm. “I can’t wait.” As their host turned his back and led the way to a side door, he whispered to Maddie, “Why?”
“Joy thinks they might be important, maybe connected somehow to the invisible rose garden at Ash Grove.” At William’s incredulous look she said defensively, “I don’t know. Joy just said to find out more.”
But the garden was, frankly, a disappointment: gravel paths leading between dead-looking square-cut hedges of brownish grey with pine bark heaped around them. Mr. Marzavan described each type of rose as they proceeded, growing more animated even as she and William grew more desperately bored. What good could this botanical onslaught do?
Nevertheless, she dutifully took photos with her phone and sent them to Joy. And at last they came to one part of the garden that was actually worth looking at. There the chopped-off bushes gave way to sprawling plants still covered with sawtoothed green leaves. They looked alive, not dormant like the formal part of the garden. Unexpectedly, red roses were still blooming. There was even an arbor of thick wooden beams with climbing roses grown all over it, the vivid red of their petals bringing an unexpected and welcome touch of warmth to the wintry scene.
“How is that possible?” asked William, sounding as excited as she felt. Maybe this was magic.
“This far south, some types of rose can bloom year round,” their host explained. “This strain here is a—”
Oh. Not sorcery, just botany. She tuned him out again. Maddie knew only what Joy and Tanner had told her about the magical rose garden that appeared so rarely at Ash Grove. She didn’t know what it looked like or even why it was so important, but any connection at all between Ash Grove and this Mo substitute might be useful. So she took lots of pictures and sent them along, hoping that some of this would be helpful.
William was making all the right conversational noises to their host, pretending to be interested in all the details of compost and grafting and—How does he do it? she wondered. He was so good with old people. He’d have her parents and Brian eating out of his hand when she introduced them.
Then another text came through from Joy, and she gasped. “Guys,” she said, interrupting something about weevils. “This looks important. Joy says that this part of the garden is an exact duplicate of the rose garden at Ash Grove, the magic one. Mo—I mean, Mr. Marzavan—did you copy this garden from another one?”
He stiffened. “I most certainly did not. I consulted plans for other gardens, of course—researching the optimal planting configuration for this elevation and soil PH—”
“That makes it even more interesting. Like maybe you were channeling something supernatural without even knowing it.” William’s eyes were bright with excitement as he looked at Maddie, excitement that she shared. Some part of their Mo was there, buried under all the clutter of the different life he’d lived. He grinned. “Maybe after all we’ll be able to—”
He vanished.
* * *
“It’s the same garden,” exclaimed Joy, holding her phone out to Eleanor Aysgarth. “Tan, I wish you could see it. The arbor, the shape of the paths—you’d recognize it.”
“I wish I could see it too,” he said. But he said it lightly, and she was proud of him for that. He was working so hard not to let himself be bitter. “Are the roses red?”
“Yes, all different shades of red.” She smiled, and again caught herself trying to catch his eye. It was still a gruesome shock each time to find that she couldn’t—to remember that she never would again. They would find new ways of communicating without words, but this disconnect still pierced her. “I’ll always remember you against the background of those red roses,” she said, since he couldn’t read the thought in her eyes.
Her father set his mug of coffee down on the table with a bump. The three of them were gathered, with Eleanor and Billups, in the Sumner dining room. Gail, they had agreed, should try to track down as many of the other original council members as she could, and she would meet them later on campus. When they attacked.
Because tonight they knew they would have to take down Melisande.
Tanner had warned them. “You’re putting yourselves in danger,” he’d said. “You need to know that. I’m risking all of your lives by fighting her, so if you’d rather be out of the line of fire, I won’t blame you—I’ll make sure you’ve had time to get away and off her radar before I go in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Joy’s father had said. “There’s no safety for anyone if we don’t stand against her. This affects everyone.” And all of them agreed, even though Stan Billups might have just been going along with them to get the story. Joy wasn’t sure he fully understood what they were up against—or believed in it.
“Tanner was with you the first time you saw the garden?” Joy’s father demanded now. “You never said that.”
“I know I didn’t,” she said. “It was private.”
“But that could be crucial! Why on earth would you withhold a potentially vital piece of information like that?”
“Like Joy said,” said Tanner. “It was private.”
“And it still is,” said Joy, laying her hand on his back to reassure him. “I don’t think it would have told us anything about the garden we didn’t already know.”
Rose made happy conversational sounds in Tan’s arms. She had awakened not long after their return, and Tanner immediately asked to hold her. As soon as Joy had settled her in his arms, she noticed that Rose was more contented with her real father than with the simulacrum, smiling up at him in apparent delight and blowing spit bubbles. How could I not have known? Joy asked herself for the millionth time.
Eleanor sat with her hands wrapped around her mug of chamomile tea (she didn’t do caffeine, she’d told them), absorbing all the information they could reconstruct for her. “Steven said that the garden was planted by Cavanaugh for his wife,” she recalled, “both to provide a benign channel for supernatural energies and as a token of his love for her. A place devoted to love. Does that align with your experience there, Joy?” There was a glint in her eye that said she knew more than the discreet question suggested, and Joy dropped her eyes, feeling bashful.
“Yeah. It does. I can’t speak for Tanner, but when he and I stepped into that garden, that was when I knew for sure that I loved him and that I would always love him.”
There was a faint smile on Tan’s face. He had borrowed Stan’s sunglasses, so the worst of his wounds were hidden from view. “I knew already how I felt about Joy. But seeing the
look in her eyes—” His voice halted for a second, but he swallowed and said firmly, “I’ll never forget it.”
Joy’s throat tightened with the agony that was always ready now to spring to the surface when she let herself think about his injury. She wished painfully that Tan could have his eyes back—just for an hour, even a minute, so he could see her look at him with love one last time. She hoped that he was speaking the truth and he would always remember the look on her face when she knew she loved him, since he would never see it again. It would have to last him the rest of their lives.
The injustice of it made her hands clench to the point of pain as she tried to keep control of herself. Keep your mind on what has to be done. Revenge won’t help. Revenge won’t bring Tan’s eyes back. If they could turn Melisande back into that freeze-dried husk, neutralize her up for good this time, take away her beauty and her power, that would be far better than revenge. Rescuing their world from her crazy influence: that was what they had to do.
That was why they were methodically making a list of all the succubus’s sources of power that they might be able to seize control of. The students and staff, with their worship of her that she fed on—they couldn’t be corralled. But the succubus wouldn’t have targeted the school in the first place, wouldn’t have had her house built on its very doorstep, if she hadn’t known that its physical location could amplify her power. And she had chosen the rose garden for the night she had intended to sacrifice Tanner to her own needs.
“When Melisande took Tanner to the garden on Samhain, it was dead,” she said now. “You saw it, Dr. Aysgarth—I mean, Eleanor—if you can remember. But it was blooming on Beltane night. Lush, even. Could that be important?”
The alternate Eleanor Aysgarth frowned thoughtfully. Her manner was becoming more formal and efficient, like the Dr. Aysgarth Joy remembered, and it sat strangely with her wild white mane of hair and gaudy costume. “Did you tell me how Melisande accessed it? That could be part of the puzzle.”
“I can’t remember,” said Tanner wearily. “I’ve tried over and over, but I don’t know how we got into the garden that night.”
“Hmm. If on Beltane it responded to the love you two had for each other, and that was why it revealed itself to you, why then would it be so accommodating to a creature who absorbs love without returning it?”
Joy’s father was making notes on a legal pad. “The two nights it’s manifested, Beltane and Samhain, are the two nights in the Celtic calendar when the veil between the human and supernatural worlds is thinnest. That may have played a large role.”
“And maybe that’s why Tan and I couldn’t find our way there a few weeks ago,” said Joy. “It wasn’t a significant day, supernaturally speaking—but neither is today. We can’t wait for the next one, can we? Not with everything already haywire and going crazier by the moment.”
“Joy, why don’t you text Maddie again,” Tanner suggested. Get her to ask Mo if there was anything special about how he planted his garden. Maybe the date was important, or the nursery where he bought the roses, or where the wood for the arbor came from—something like that.”
“Good thinking, Tanner,” said Eleanor warmly. “Ask him too if there was any kind of ritual to it. Some gardeners, even unbelievers, make some kind of an offering to Gaia or Ceres when they plant something new or dedicate a garden, just for luck. It could have been as simple as christening the arbor with a bottle of champagne.”
Joy nodded, texting as fast as she could.
“Here’s a thought,” said her father. “If the garden responds to profound love, maybe it even responds to self-love like Melisande’s. Or love of power. That may have been why she was able to access it.”
Tanner’s mouth twisted doubtfully. “That seems kind of like the letter of the law without the spirit,” he said. “Is that how magic works?”
“It works by its own rules,” said Joy’s father. “All we can do is try to determine what they are. There is another possibility,” he added. “I’m sorry to bring it up, Tanner—I know it must be painful for you—but you’ve indicated that there was a time, however brief, when you loved Melisande.”
“But that didn’t last. As soon as I realized what she was really like, that ended.”
“I know, but it’s possible that the remnants of that love were sufficient to allow Melisande to call up the garden. I’m not blaming you,” he said quickly, perhaps sensing the angry protest on the tip of Joy’s tongue. “I’m just trying to consider all the angles.”
“Maybe that’s why the garden was dead that night,” Eleanor offered. “It was mirroring the warped, dead kind of love that Melisande embodied, or Tanner’s love for her that she killed. If that’s so, do you think it could still be dead? That could be why it didn’t open to you two when you tried to find sanctuary there again.”
The thought filled Joy with dismay. The feeling worsened when Tan said slowly, “From what she said, I think it’s more like it’s diseased. If it’s what’s causing all the couples we know to break up or be divided somehow, it’s still mirroring Melisande’s ugliness.”
“We should try to think of a way to restore it to its proper state.” Joy’s father was scribbling more notes. “And we should also be looking for other places where Melisande may be channeling energies. The statue, for example. From what Maddie told me, it sounded like a very powerful vessel—and now that it’s been removed, that location’s a wild card. Which reminds me, has Maddie found out anything more?”
Joy shook her head as she checked her phone. “There’s nothing else from her yet. It may be a little while, if she and William are having to tread carefully with Alterna-Mo.” She spared a moment of gratitude that Maddie and William were away from Ash Grove. The farther from Melisande they were, she guessed, the safer they’d be.
“We haven’t talked about how to defeat her yet,” said Tanner. “I think that’s the main thing we should be focusing on. It’s great to know where we may be able to find her, but what happens when we get there?”
“I think I have the answer to that,” said Eleanor, sliding a book toward the center of the table and tapping a yellow-highlighted passage. Joy saw her father’s lips thin in disapproval at the sight of the book marked up in so cavalier a fashion. Steven treated books like precious relics and had taught Joy to use the same courtesy—but surely such niceties could be overlooked in an emergency, she thought. “It seems that a succubus can be trapped if we get her to look in a mirror,” Eleanor told them. “She’ll be so enamored by her own image that it will transfix her.”
“And then what?”
“Then, when she’s essentially been captured in the mirror, we break it—and that, according to the lore, will kill her.”
“She’s been looking into mirrors as long as I’ve known her,” Tanner pointed out. “I don’t understand why she’d suddenly be vulnerable to them.”
“Perhaps the mirror has to be earmarked or specially prepared for the purpose,” Steven suggested, drawing the book toward him and running his finger down the page as he scanned the text. “A simple inscription on the back may be sufficient to entrap her so that she can be killed. Ah, yes, I believe this passage here…”
“Killed,” repeated Stan Billups, his good-natured face troubled. He’d been very quiet, and Joy wasn’t sure if it was because he felt out of his depth or because he thought they were all crazy. “That’s something you don’t come back from, man. I’ve never killed anything but mosquitoes and palmetto bugs. Are you sure we have to go that far?”
Once Joy would have felt the same reluctance. Before Samhain, even when Tan’s life had been at stake, she and Mo and Gail had only looked for a way to free him, not to kill the succubus. And when Melisande had been shrunken to a husk, she was just locked up, not destroyed. But Joy wished now that she’d crushed that husk to bits with a rock and scattered the fragments into the river, never to harm them again. Then Tan wouldn’t be—
“We can’t risk leaving her alive,” she sa
id. “You heard what Tan said. It’s her or us. And by us I mean humanity.” She sounded so certain. Would she be that sure when she had to face the creature again?
“If she’s that powerful, how are we going to beat her with a mirror?” Stan objected. “It doesn’t sound possible.”
“That’s not our entire plan,” said her father. “Besides, we have an advantage—Raven.”
Tan turned his unseeing face toward him. “What do you mean? Has he decided to change sides after all?”
Joy’s father smiled. It was the first time he’d looked less than grim since Joy and Eleanor’s arrival. “He claims he has, although I think we’d be fools to trust him. In either case, he’s no longer in a position to work against us or inform Melisande of our plans. Come and see.”
Pushing back his chair, he rose and led the way to the kitchen. Joy got to her feet and then hesitated, looking at Tan as he sat holding Rose in his arms. All those stairs to the basement… “Would you rather stay here?” she asked.
“You go on. Just don’t leave me long, okay?”
“I won’t be a minute.” She brushed her lips across his cheek and then followed the others to the basement stairs. Ahead of her, Eleanor gave a startled gasp, and Joy ran down the last few steps so that she could see what had caused her reaction.
Between the dehumidifier and boxes of Christmas ornaments a captive stood. The false Tanner who had been living with her for weeks, eyeing them with a cynical twist of his mouth that was pure Raven.
He stood quietly, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, held immobile by a wire loop around his neck connecting to a wooden pole whose other end was hooked to a ceiling beam. Some restraining magic must have been at work; otherwise he could have unhooked the pole easily and freed himself, or transformed himself into a creature whose head was small enough to slip from the wire loop.
Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles) Page 27