Covenkeepers

by Denise Gwen

  Covenkeepers

  Denise Gwen

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Covenkeepers©2018 by Denise Barone.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information:

  baroneliteraryagency@roadrunner.com

  Cover Art by © 2018 Cover Art by Cora Graphics

  Created with Vellum

  1

  “Mama,” Maddie whimpered. “Why is the master warlock being so mean to Papa?”

  “Hush, Maddie,” Mama said.

  Maddie, her mother Claudia, her sister Bettina, and her grandmother Agatha all stood huddled together on an upper deck in the vast hall.

  Ezekiel, the master warlock of the castle, sat below them on his throne. He nodded curtly at his retinue of vampire guards. “Bring forth the prisoner.”

  A resounding silence, punctuated only by the echoing drops of water from an upper casement window, filled the cavernous hall. Hundreds of witches, warlocks, vampires and familiars, stood shoulder-to-shoulder; not a single creature stirred or said a word in protest. The silence grew more pronounced as a handsome, raven-haired warlock, surrounded by guards, walked into the center of the ring and stared up defiantly at Ezekiel.

  “Daniel, my love,” Mama whispered.

  “You’ve benefitted, no doubt, from the six days of solitary confinement imposed upon you,” Ezekiel said. “And now I’m sure you’ve reconsidered your decision?”

  “Yes, my liege, I have.”

  “And?”

  Everyone inhaled as one.

  “My answer remains the same.”

  A shudder of tension shivered throughout the hall and tears filled Maddie’s eyes. Despite being thirteen years of age and considering herself a fully mature young witch, her family believed she was yet too young to know the particulars of this matter concerning Ezekiel and her father—the master warlock wanted something from her family, and her father had refused him—but she did understand the severity of this situation, especially as it concerned her entire family.

  “It displeases me to hear this.”

  “I’m sure it does, my liege, but my answer remains final.”

  “Very well, then. You leave me no other choice.”

  “As you see fit.”

  Ezekiel snapped his fingers. “Lower him into the pit.”

  A few witches cried out. Maddie’s heart thudded dully as a vampire guard stepped forward and hooked a thick rope through the manacles at her father’s wrists. When the guard glanced up into the rafters, Maddie looked up as well to see a guard standing at the pulley. At the signal, the guard thrust his hands on a crank and began turning it in a clockwise direction. As the crank reached its first revolution, Maddie saw it’d raised the rope attached to her father’s wrist manacles and he now stood in the arena with his arms stretched over his head. The guard above continued to turn the crank, and, little by little, the rope lifted her father’s feet off the floor until he dangled in the air, the rope cutting painful-looking tracks into his skin as rivulets of blood stained the hemp and dripped to the ground.

  “Oh, my husband!” Mama wept. “Oh, Daniel!”

  A second guard joined the one at the pulley. This one used a different lever to haul her father across the arena and over to a large hole in the center of the arena.

  “Claudia,” Nana whispered. “We need to leave.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Claudia said. “My poor husband.”

  Papa now hung precipitously above the hole.

  The assembled warlocks and witches cried out in consternation. Ezekiel watched all this with a reptilian stare.

  “Lower him down.”

  As the pulley gears strained, the guards lowered her father into the enormous pit.

  “What are they going to do to him?” Maddie asked.

  “Initiate the carbonite freeze mechanism.”

  “Daniel!” Mama cried out. “Daniel!”

  “Goodbye, my darling.” Papa looked up beseechingly at her mother, and then he mouthed the words, “Claudia, leave now.”

  A frisson of terror flashed through Maddie’s heart.

  Nana pulled on Maddie’s arm. “We need to leave . . . now.”

  “I can’t leave Papa.”

  “We must, Maddie. Now, while there’s still time, while everyone’s still distracted.”

  The guards reversed the revolution of the crank and turned it counter-clockwise, lowering Daniel into the pit. With every revolution of the wheel, Maddie watched with a sinking sensation in her belly as her father’s body disappeared from sight. At last, only his face appeared just above the surface of the pit; then, when his face disappeared, his hands, manacled together, remained visible, until finally, her father dropped below the surface.

  “Claudia,” Nana said. “Now.”

  A hissing sound rose up from deep inside the pit. Tendrils of white smoke drifted along the surface, curling around imaginary strings in the ambient air. Then a tremendous roaring sound followed, a horrible, wrenching sound, one filling Maddie’s heart with despair. What was happening to her father in that deep pit?

  Papa screamed.

  Nana pulled Maddie’s sister away from the railing. “Come, Bettina. We must leave now.”

  “All right, Nana,” Bettina said, although she did not stir; her gaze remained fixed on the pit below.

  “Nana,” Maddie whimpered. “Papa’s dying!”

  “Nonsense,” Nana said, but her voice lacked conviction.

  “Increase the power,” Ezekiel ordered.

  The vampire guards, stationed behind the control panel, worked feverishly. Lights and buttons glowed and strange beeping sounds issued from the control panel. As the vampires worked, the wispy tendrils of freezing smoke turned into a geyser of fog, followed by a freezing rain. A swirling mist rose up from the pit, and the scream coming from her father’s mouth . . . oh, it sounded like nothing she’d ever heard before . . . the sound of a soul being wrenched in two.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw her father as he screamed out in pain, writhing in agony.

  Nana grasped Mama’s arm and pulled. “Now, Claudia. Or stay behind and suffer the consequences.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “We can do no more for him. We must look to ourselves, now.”

  “Yes, Mama, I know.”

  Maddie peered down over the railing one last time. An awful silence had filled the hall. A tug on her arm and she turned to look.

  Her older sister, Bettina. “Come, Maddie.”

  Maddie followed. She cast one last, despairing glance over her shoulder, just as the carbonite freeze block, with her father entombed inside it, emerged from the pit.

  “Maddie!” Nana said.

  Maddie whirled back around and followed her family as they fled the hall. With Nana leading the way, the foursome hurried from the hall and down a corridor. When they reached a stone wall, Nana tapped it with her wand and it creaked open. They ducked through into a dark passageway. In a matt
er of moments, they stood outside the castle walls.

  Their familiars, who’d been waiting in the woods, emerged at the forest entrance, holding the witches’ broomsticks. The sleek cougar loped up to Nana, her broomstick clamped between the cougar’s jaws; a steely-eyed ferret handed Mama her broomstick. Bettina’s barnyard owl swooped in from a branch and dropped her broomstick into her outstretched hands.

  “Malamar?” Maddie called out.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” a fat, and terribly self-satisfied ginger cat approached from the underbrush, the broomstick curled daintily in his fluffy tail. He turned his butt around and dropped the broomstick at his mistress’s feet.

  “Come on,” Nana said. “They’ve already discovered we’re missing.”

  Maddie cocked her head. Yes, she heard the distant sound of the alarm.

  “And off we go,” Nana said, lifting off into the air on her broomstick and with her cougar perched behind her.

  Mama, Bettina, and Maddie followed, with their familiars perched behind them on their respective broomsticks.

  As they circled around in the air above the castle, Maddie glanced down at the place that’d been her home ever since her birth.

  When shall I ever see Papa again?

  ****

  “Pull him up,” Ezekiel said.

  The vampire guards strained at the ropes; by infinitesimal degrees, and with the pulleys screaming in protest, they pulled the carbonite block up from the pit. The assembled coven hissed at the apparition. Suspended in the air, and pressed into a rectangular wall of carbon, appeared the outline of Daniel’s form; his body caught as if in a rictus of rage. He’d frozen into place even as he fought against the icy carbonite, even as it consumed him whole.

  Ezekiel smiled in satisfaction as the assembled witches and warlocks gazed, transfixed, at the sight of Daniel, his body frozen into an attitude of pain and torment as he’d writhed in the steaming blast of freezing spray. But his face was the most horrifying feature; for at the moment the icy blast attacked his face, his mouth had been wide open in a gaping maw of a scream, caught halfway between terror and rage. His eyes remained frozen wide open, as if crying out for a succor that would not come.

  “Finish him off now,” Ezekiel ordered.

  The technicians’ fingers flew across the control panel. A sheet of ice-cold water poured over the carbonite block; hissing steam rose from the floor, a steam so hot that the witches and warlocks standing close to the railing cried out in pain as their faces and hands seared raw with burns. After a long moment, the steam shimmered away.

  Ezekiel heard shouts and screams from outside the castle, but his attention remained focused on the sight below him.

  The guards hesitated.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Ezekiel roared. “Pull him up!”

  At the last possible moment, in the seconds before the carbonite freeze assailed his nervous system, Daniel had broken free of his restraints; with his arms outstretched, and his mouth wide-open in a silent scream of pain, he looked to be the most tortured of souls. The assembled witches and warlocks cried out as they saw the features of their dear friend, for they all realized the same truth, and it was this: in the moments before he froze, Daniel had suffered.

  Ezekiel gazed proudly at the abomination he’d created.

  A vampire guard ran into the hall and collapsed to his knees before the imperious warlock. “Your Grace, ill news.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sire—”

  Ezekiel craned his neck around and his dark gaze fell upon the place where—not five minutes earlier—Daniel’s family had huddled. “Fool! How could you let them escape?”

  “Sire, I am so very sorry—”

  The warlock pulled a wand from a pocket in his greatcoat and shouted, “Vaporoteum!”

  Ice blue flames flared from the vampire’s feet, flashed up over his body, and incinerated him in moments. He screamed out one last, terrifying howl, as his body burst into cinders of dust, decay, and the sickly acrid stench of long-ago rot and death. As motes of dust and ash floated dreamily around in the air, Ezekiel dropped the wand to his side and coolly surveyed the assembled coven and corps of vampires. “Don’t let this happen to you. I want them found. Summon the lieutenant.”

  The lieutenant vampire materialized at Ezekiel’s side. “Yes, my liege?”

  “They’ve escaped from the castle,” Ezekiel noted curtly. “Find them.”

  “Yes, my liege.” The vampire gestured for his assistants and they marched from the hall.

  Ezekiel directed his attention to the assembled coven. “Let this be a lesson to you all. Disobey me at your peril.”

  The witches and warlocks trembled as the vampire guards pushed the carbonite block past them.

  Ezekiel stood up from his throne and, his thoughts in an agony of worry and frustration, quit the hall and retired to his private suite. This evening should’ve been his moment of triumph; only the triumph proved short-lived by the escape of the warlock’s family. “They must be found,” he muttered to himself. “They must be found.” He strode to a casement window and gazed out at the clear night sky. Bartholomew, his lieutenant, would find them, surely, he would.

  “They must be found,” he repeated, but with a sudden stab of sorrow, he realized something important. The more he said it, the less he believed it likely to happen.

  Daniel’s family simply had to be found.

  Everything depended on it.

  ****

  As evening dusk faded into a fiery ball of crimson sunset, silhouetted against the burning glow of the sun appeared the outline of four figures on broomsticks circling above the sleepy village of Batesville. The broomsticks dipped and bobbled, coasted into warm air currents, then lifted high above the purple and blue evening clouds, before dipping down low again, and hovering above the houses.

  On each broomstick perched a witch, and seated behind her, her familiar.

  The ginger cat raised a paw to his mouth and licked with a judicious air. “Well,” he said in an aggrieved tone of voice, “I don’t mind saying, ‘I told you so,’ because I did warn the lot of you that we needed to make good our escape.”

  “Oh, Malamar,” Maddie sighed. “Please don’t put us through this again.”

  “I did warn you all, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, of course you did.”

  “I told you so.”

  “Enough.”

  “I told the lot of you, hours ago, that we needed to flee. But did anybody listen to me? Oh, nooooo, of course not. Nobody listens to me.”

  “Of course we listen to you.” Maddie looked to the others for confirmation, but nobody looked her way. She sighed with disappointment.

  “After all, I am a mere cat.” He huffed himself up into a fluffy ball of indignant fur. “Never mind the fact that I possess more sense than the lot of you combined.”

  “Hush,” Nana cut in. “That’s enough, Malamar.”

  “I just wanted to say—”

  “No more lording it over us, hm?” Nana flashed him with a warning glance.

  Malamar finished washing his paw and set it down onto the broomstick with a dainty disdain. “Darn you, Agatha, and your blasted mind reading.”

  Nana flashed him a flinty smile. “One of my special talents, don’t you know.”

  “Oh, all right.” With an irritated jerk of his whiskers, Malamar flung himself down onto the broomstick and brooded.

  They drew closer to the village, circling around it; they scanned the rooftops, the sidewalks, the driveways, and the streets, searching for one particular location. Then, as dusk finally gave itself up to the sleek, somnolent night, and as the sun’s rays vanished into the west, the witches lowered their broomsticks, and dropped so low, their broomsticks skimmed along the treetops.

  “When are we stopping, Nana?” Maddie said. “I’m so tired.”

  “Soon,” Nana muttered. She scrunched up her eyebrows and her eyes widened in surprise as she noticed something tha
t attracted her attention.

  “There, Mother. Do you see it?” Claudia pointed. “There, between the trees?”

  “Yes, I see it too.” Nana turned to the other witches. “Girls, do you see it?” She gestured with one gnarly hand to the large, squat, white clapboard-sided house perched on a rolling hillock and surrounded on all sides by trees. A long, sloping gravel driveway led up to the front porch. At the beginning of the driveway, where it intersected with the street, stood a battered sign that bore years of wear. It read Batesville Nursing Home.

  Nana nudged her broomstick down and skimmed up the driveway, not stopping until she reached the porticoed front porch with peeling white pillars on either side of the shuttered-up house.

  “We’re living in a nursing home?” Bettina asked, aghast. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “It’s empty,” Nana said. “Look in the windows, why don’t you? They’re all boarded up. Look at the yard, the driveway. It’s all overgrown and cluttered with weeds. Nobody’s lived here for ages.”

  “Nobody’s died here recently, either,” Maddie remarked tartly. She shook out her deep red tresses as she stepped off her broomstick. “People go to nursing homes to do only one thing, and that’s to die.”

  “Oh, Maddie,” Bettina tut-tutted under her breath. “You’re always so maudlin.”

  Maddie thrust her sharp little chin forward. “I don’t like nursing homes.”

  “Well, ladies,” Mama interjected. “We’re out of options at the present moment. We must stop somewhere. It may as well be here.” She gazed up with some asperity at the sagging and broken-spindled shutters. “Nana’s right, though. Nobody’s been here in an age. Nobody will bother us.”

  “We’re far from the main village,” Nana noted with a steely gaze, “and if we put a warding curse at the driveway entrance, nobody can enter without our knowledge.” Agatha glanced to her daughter. “I’ll take care of the warding curse. Claudia, you get the girls settled in. Bettina, look to dinner.”