Covenkeepers

by Denise Gwen

  I’m just so freaking grateful Papa’s such a clever warlock.

  “Turn around and look, sweetheart,” Papa said.

  Maddie so did not want to look.

  But she knew she must.

  “Just don’t scream aloud,” Papa urged her.

  “Okay, not something I want to hear.”

  “I know, sweetheart, but please do try to restrain yourself.”

  “I hate to look,” she muttered, but she turned her head and what she saw made her eyes widen in horror and fear.

  “Oh, my Goddess,” she whispered. “What are we going to do now?”

  11

  Hundreds of pairs of black eyes stared at her. And not one of them looked happy to see her.

  “Thank Goddess you had the foresight to block the doorway, Papa,” she said.

  She shivered at the thought of what might’ve happened to them all if he hadn’t blocked the entranceway to the cell. Then she realized she really didn’t want to know what would’ve happened—bad enough just being in this situation, being stared at by a bunch of vampires as if she were an exhibit in the zoo.

  Now she knew how the polar bears felt.

  “How long have they been here?” she asked in a hushed tone.

  “Oh, an hour or so,” Papa said with a negligent shrug, as if it were an everyday occurrence to find vampires leering at one while one slept.

  “When…?” she asked, not finishing her question. Oh, so many questions.

  “They are speaking,” a voice said. Maddie started with surprise. The voice came from the hallway outside.

  The vampires were listening in. They could hear every word, every sound, every murmur. A shudder of disgust shot through her; they’d watched her as she slept. For some reason, the idea of being watched without her knowledge filled her heart with loathing. These vampires. What malevolent, disgusting creatures. The sooner she got her family out of this castle, the better.

  “The first one arrived an hour ago,” Papa said. “And then, little by little, the doorway filled up.”

  Malamar’s fur bristled as he edged over to Maddie and jumped up onto the bed.

  Bettina moaned softly in her sleep.

  “Nasty bits of trouble,” Malamar hissed. “They’ve been poking and prodding at the bubble for the longest time. One managed to get her six-inch nail through, but then it bounced back on her.”

  “Oh my.” Maddie winced.

  “I cast a good spell,” Papa said proudly. “No way that bubble’s going to burst, at least not until I say so.”

  “How are we going to get out of here?” Maddie asked.

  Papa smiled. “Don’t worry, pet. I’ve still got some ideas tucked away in this creaky old head of mine.”

  Just then, Bettina cried out in alarm and shot up in bed. She blinked vacantly for a moment; then, as an awareness of her surroundings returned, a look of tension settled on her face. Maddie hated seeing the fear in her sister’s eyes. She so wished she could figure out some way to help her sister feel better.

  “I want to prepare you, Bettina,” she said gently. “There’s something in the doorway.”

  “What? Oh, what is it?” Bettina whirled her head around. In the same instant she registered the presence of the vampires, she shrieked and bolted from her bed, cowering against the stone wall.

  The vampires, finding this simply hilarious, laughed and cackled at Bettina. They slapped each other on their backs, their dark eyes gleaming wetly.

  “I hate you,” she cried.

  They laughed harder.

  Papa surprised Maddie by jumping to his feet. He’d regained much of his strength. The vampires cut their laughter short at the sight of the furious warlock.

  “It’s time,” he said, his bushy eyebrows bristling.

  Maddie and Bettina exchanged glances.

  “Time for what, Papa?” Maddie asked.

  “Girls,” Papa said in a low voice. “Come here.”

  Sensing a change, the vampires grew eerily still. They pressed their faces forward, pushing up against the bubble’s oily surface. The bubble’s sinewy threads, depleted during the hours when the warlock and his daughters had been sleeping, now gave enough the vampires could push their bodies into the room, before being eased back against the springy resistance of the bubble. Soon, the bubble’s strength would be compromised and the vampires would tear it to shreds.

  “All right,” Papa said. “This is what we’re going to do.”

  “Papa!” Maddie cried. “The bubble’s tearing.”

  Papa reared his head back. One of the vampires slid a black fingernail between the stone carapace and the bubble’s filament where it’d connected to the stone wall; a sliver of a tear ripped away from the wall. The other vampires—pressing their point—pushed up against the bubble with all their might. Already, three of them were literally standing inside the threshold to the cell; the bubble still held them back, but Maddie saw tiny stress fissures along the carapace.

  The first vampire—the one who’d breached the lining—sawed her talon-like fingernail through the tiny sliver of a hole she’d torn open and kept grinding at it. In another moment, she’d thrust her hand through, and who knew what she’d do when she got inside?

  The girls cowered against their father.

  “No time, no time,” he muttered. “Bettina, shape-shift now.”

  Bettina did nothing; her gaze focused on the tear in the bubble, she stared as if hypnotized.

  “Bettina,” Papa repeated. “Shape-shift now.”

  She turned to gaze at Papa, her eyes filled with terror. At first, Maddie thought Bettina didn’t hear him, but then she pulled her wand from her pocket. She muttered the incantation and suddenly disappeared. In her place perched a sleek black cat. She jumped nimbly off the cot and strolled over to Papa, rubbing her head against his leg.

  Papa reached down and stroked her back. “Bettina, I want you to follow Malamar. He knows the way.”

  Roby flew to the casement window. He squeezed through the tight iron bars and perched on the outside ledge, peering in with a worried frown.

  “This way,” Malamar said to Bettina, and together the two cats disappeared under the tiny cot. The vampires, seeing their prey escaping, redoubled their efforts. The vampire who’d pushed her hand through the opening snarled as she saw the cats disappearing, and tore the shreds tying the bubble to the doorframe, forcing the bubble to burst. She could put her head through if she wanted. And she looked like she wanted.

  Papa pulled Maddie’s wand from her clenched fist, pointed the wand tip to her forehead and uttered the shape-shifting incantation. Maddie’s body writhed and changed as everything in the cell grew enormous around her. She craned her neck up and saw she only just cleared the tip of her father’s foot. “What did you change me into?” she squeaked.

  “Run,” Papa ordered her. “Follow your sister!”

  “But I want to stay with you.”

  “You can’t,” Papa cried, pointing the wand at his own forehead and uttering the incantation one last time. A burst of light shot forth and in the next moment, Papa flew away through the casement window as a bat.

  The vampires roared in frustration. With a shriek of consternation, the first vampire ripped the bubble open and stomped into the room, her black eyes focused directly on Maddie. “Uh-oh,” Maddie squeaked.

  She ducked and scuttled under the cot, looking around her wildly in terror.

  Bettina’s gone! Malamar’s gone!

  “Well, well, well. What have we here?” the vampire purred. She yanked the cot up from the floor, exposing a cowering Maddie.

  Maddie gazed up at the vampire, her whiskers twitching in fear.

  “Maddie, over here!” Bettina cried.

  Maddie turned and saw a pair of whiskers gleaming from a hole, a fissure between two unmortared stone crevices. Bettina’s feline eyes gazed at her. Maddie didn’t wait for a second invitation.

  As the vampire brought her black stiletto heel crashing to
the floor, Maddie scurried to the hole and disappeared inside.

  The vampire screamed and spat. “Oh, you little brat!”

  Maddie trembled with fright as she gazed out from inside the hole. The vampires crowded into the cell, tossing cots aside, kicking at the straw bale, searching for them.

  A paw on her tail.

  Maddie squeaked.

  “What took you so long?” Bettina demanded.

  “I got here as fast as I could.”

  “Papa told you to run.”

  “He turned me into a mouse, didn’t he?” Maddie asked mournfully. “A mouse!”

  “But a cute one,” Malamar said. “Come on, we need to find your mother and your nana.”

  “Do you know where they are?” Maddie asked.

  “Yes,” Malamar said. “We were waiting for you. Follow me.”

  She was only too happy to oblige; the first vampire reached her talon-like fingers into the hole, pushing stones aside, trying to catch her. The edge of a fingernail flicked up against her tail, and she ran.

  “I hate being a mouse!”

  “Learn to shape-shift yourself, then,” Bettina called over her shoulder, “and you can turn yourself into whatever you want.”

  Maddie squeaked in irritation.

  I hate it when Bettina’s right.

  ****

  As Maddie scuttled along the fissure behind her sister and Malamar, every tiny bone in her itty-bitty body quivered with sensations of terror intermixed with feelings of amazement—terror at being hunted, first by a rampaging troll and then by blood-thirsty vampires; amazement at how odd her body felt in the form of a field mouse.

  Why, of all possible animals, did Papa shape-shift me into a field mouse?

  Perhaps Papa had sensed something of her ordeal in the haunted house in Batesville, for he didn’t turn her into one of those kinds of mice—not one of the mean, nasty mice that had torn out of the faded wallpaper in the hallway—but a sweet kind of field mouse, with floppy little ears. A field mouse, to be exact, a field mouse with a coat of soft brown downy fur and floppy ears. As she scurried along the fissure, it did not feel strange at all—no, not at all—for her to drop little pellets of poo from her tiny bottom. No, not only did it feel natural, but it also felt right.

  What didn’t feel right—and this was kind of a biggie—was following so close on the heels of two cats. She kept resisting the urge to shrink back, to creep into a crevice and hide; she fought against this instinct with all her might.

  I must keep Malamar’s tail in sight.

  It didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel right at all, but she kept up with Malamar and Bettina. As she scurried along behind them, her whiskers sensing out new smells and incandescent sensations, she pushed her tiny worries to the back of her itty-bitty brain.

  Presently, they arrived at an opening in the fissure which grew wide enough to accommodate the three of them walking side-by-side. Flanked on either side by a cat—with Bettina on her left and Malamar on her right—Maddie gazed down at the scene below her.

  “Oh, poor Mama and Nana,” Bettina said.

  Maddie’s heart thumped hard in her tiny chest.

  A hundred feet directly below them, trapped in a large, windowless cell, lay the crumpled forms of Mama and Nana. On the opposite side of the cell door, Maddie could just make out a thatch of black hair—no doubt, the solitary guard standing watch. Thick ropes bound Mama’s and Nana’s wrists and ankles; the ropes were attached to the stone wall with metal coils. With their heads bent down low over their bent forms, they looked so broken, beaten down.

  An awful thing to see.

  “It’s too far down to jump,” Bettina said. “Malamar and I would die in the fall.”

  “It is mighty far down,” Maddie agreed, then her whiskers twitched up. “But I can climb down it.”

  “You can?” Bettina asked in surprise.

  “Oh, yes. Mice can climb up and down just about anything.” She shuddered at the memory of thousands of tiny clicking feet scrabbling up and down the inside walls of the house in Batesville.

  “Off you go, then,” Malamar said.

  Maddie scuttled up to the lip of the fissure and crawled down it, her wet pink nose facing the stone floor below. Under ordinary circumstances, she would’ve been frightened out of her mind—she was terrified of heights—but as a mouse, this felt like nothing. The stone wall felt delightfully craggy beneath her tiny claws, with lovely joints and cracks, so fun to scrabble across, and with so many delicious tastes and smells. Maddie easily navigated her way down to the stone floor.

  As easy as walking, really, just as easy as walking.

  Once she reached the cobble-stoned floor, she scurried quickly across it and slid between her mother’s feet.

  “Oh,” Mama moaned.

  “Mama,” Maddie said.

  Nana lifted her head but did not see Maddie.

  “Mama, Nana,” Maddie repeated.

  Perhaps sensing a presence near her—she didn’t see Maddie yet—Mama jerked her arms upward and let out a little cry of pain. Nana tut-tutted at her, murmuring soothing words. “There, there, my darling. There, there.”

  Tears stung Maddie’s eyes. So good to hear Nana’s voice again.

  The guard lumbered to his feet with a creaky groan and peered inside.

  Maddie cowered behind her mother’s right foot. After a long moment, the guard grunted, then dropped down heavily onto his chair.

  “Claudia,” Nana whispered. “Maddie’s here.”

  “She is?” Mama asked, raising her head, a fearful look filling her eyes. She looked around the cell. “Dear Goddess, no, I thought she avoided capture.”

  “She’s here of her own volition.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Look at your feet. No, don’t move your feet, sweetheart. You’ll crush her.”

  Mama gazed down, her eyes opening wide with surprise. “Oh,” she crooned, “there you are, my little one.”

  “Hello, Mama,” Maddie squeaked.

  “You make the sweetest little mouse,” Mama said.

  Maddie wanted to say more, but her throat filled with tears.

  “All right, enough of that now,” Nana said, her voice thick with emotion. “Let the girl get to work.”

  Mama fell back against the stone wall, looking faint. “Oh, sweetheart, you make such a darling little mouse.”

  Maddie gazed uncertainly at her mother, then glanced over at Nana, who nodded. “Best get to work, my dear. It’s nearly dawn.”

  Maddie set to work. First, she gnawed away at the thick ropes binding her mother’s ankles. She’d never eaten rope before—couldn’t understand why not; it tasted so yummy, all crunchy, and gritty, and filled with fiber. Why, she could eat it forever.

  She chewed and chewed at the rope binding her mother’s ankles together, loosening her mother’s restraints, and then chewed up the last little sliver of rope. When it fell away to the floor, Mama cried out with relief.

  “Tuck your feet underneath you, Claudia,” Nana said. “Just in case the guard peeks in and sees that your feet are unbound.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Now it’s your turn, Nana,” Maddie squeaked, hurrying over to Nana and gnawing on the ropes encircling Nana’s ankles. Nana winced as Maddie chewed at a particularly gnarly piece of rope on the outside of her left ankle; her captors had tied Nana’s ankles tight, so tight it’d cut her delicate skin. Maddie tried as carefully as she could, but she accidentally nipped a piece of rope cutting into Nana’s flesh. Nana whimpered once, then drew silent.

  “Oh, Nana,” Maddie wept.

  “Never mind that now, child,” Nana said. “Just get me free.”

  A tiny flare of anger pierced Maddie’s heart as she saw the purple bruises forming tight bracelets on Nana’s ankles.

  “How dare they treat my family like this!” she protested.

  “Tut-tut, child,” Nana said. “Now to my hands, dear.”

  Maddie next turned her
attention to the ropes binding Nana’s hands. She gnawed at the rope binding Nana’s wrists, and when at last Nana’s wrists came free, Nana quickly thrust her hands behind her back, just in case the guard felt the need to check in on them again. Maddie scuttled down Nana’s arm and began working on her mother’s wrists.

  “Oh, my Goddess,” Nana said. “That feels so much better.” She glanced around the cell. “Where are the others?”

  Halfway through her mother’s bindings, Maddie stopped nibbling and lifted her shiny snout. “Malamar and Bettina are a hundred feet above us. Papa shape-shifted into a bat and took Roby with him.”

  Nana’s eyes opened wide in amazement. “Your father? He’s alive?”

  “Daniel?” Mama choked out. “He’s safe?”

  “Yes,” Maddie said.

  “Oh, my Goddess, that’s wonderful,” Nana said.

  “I don’t know where he’s gone to, though,” Maddie said mournfully.

  “Don’t you fret over your father,” Nana said. “He’ll be just fine.”

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

  Maddie bit through the last strand of rope binding her mother to the wall. Mama was so weak, she fell over in a dead faint.

  “Oh dear,” Nana said. “Your poor, dear mother.”

  “Mama,” Maddie squeaked. “Mama.”

  “Hush, child,” Nana chided her. “Where’s your wand?”

  “Papa’s got it,” Maddie said, shame-faced. “He shape-shifted me.”

  “What about Bettina?”

  “I think she’s got her wand. She shape-shifted herself, you know,” Maddie added, abashed.

  This was a source of embarrassment to Maddie.

  She preferred taking the form of a sleek black cat, but by the age of eleven, Bettina could shape-shift into any animal she wanted. Maddie still didn’t quite possess the skill; quite frankly, she couldn’t shape-shift at all, and that made her feel foolish and stupid. Oh, but there were so many things, so many skills, charms, and incantations Maddie still didn’t know how to perform.

  I’m a right miserable excuse for a witch.

  Nana narrowed her eyes, gazing up at the wall, then laughed softly. “Ah, my darling girl. I see those beautiful blue glowing eyes.”