“I already told you,” Annette said. “You just have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and slip back into the saddle.”
“The saddle has nothing to do with it. My powers are gone. There’s nothing I can do about it.” I winced, hoping my dads wouldn’t kill me over this next part. “And I’ve decided to move back to Phoenix for a while.”
“You what?” Papi was the first to speak.
“Cariña,” Dad said, “maybe you should give this some time.”
“Exactly.” Annette’s face lit with hope. “You can’t just leave. What about Percy?”
“Percy has survived decades without my help. I think he’ll be fine.” I looked down at the vine near my wrist, but it was gone.
“Defiance.” Dad’s soft accent hardened like it did when I was about to get a lecture.
Except I was forty-four—forty-five—and plenty old enough to decide for myself where I would live.
“What is this really about?” he asked.
“Right?” Annette pointed her knife at him as though he’d nailed it. “There’s something else going on here. She can’t just lose her powers. To do that, she has to die.”
“She”—I said, growing annoyed at being spoken about like I wasn’t here—“never wanted the powers in the first place. Therefore, she says good riddance.”
Unlike the rest of the group, who gave new meaning to the term up in arms, Roane hadn’t moved a muscle, his hawklike gaze missing nothing.
She stood, placed her napkin on the table, and headed out of the kitchen before the grilling could commence. And, sadly, before she got a piece of cake.
As I left, the group sat there, talking over the odds of me losing my powers. “Maybe they’re just dormant.” “Maybe Dephne’s just scared after what happened.” “What did it all mean in the grand scheme of things?” “What would happen when she left Percy’s protection to go back to the A-Z.”
But she was nowhere near that selfish. They had to know I would never abandon them. Annette and my dads had moved a thousand miles from home to be with me. To be here for me. To help me through this time of transition. I just needed time to breathe. Time to think about what to do. Time to research and figure out how to get rid of my powers for real, because no way could I face what was coming. And if they knew what was coming, they wouldn’t want me to.
They could call me a coward when the time came, but they were clueless about what was out there. They didn’t realize that true evil existed. And I wasn’t talking about serial-killer evil. Or total-disdain-for-human-life evil. But an evil that could rock the foundation of the world as we knew it.
An evil that was coming for me.
Everyone I’d left sitting at the table thought Percy had been protecting me—even from them. And he may have been. But if my dreams were to be believed, he’d done so much more than that. The vines were as much of a supernatural barrier as a physical one. And with them, Percy had kept things at bay that would terrify most humans.
And he’d done it over and over and over while I’d slept.
Four
In my defense,
I was left unsupervised.
-Meme
Since the thought of being stalked by that dark nightmare filled me with a crushing fear that rivaled the time I thought I’d killed Annette with a cheese grater, I decided not to purposely seek it out. My beauty rest could wait. Instead, there were a series of secret passageways calling my name.
Not literally, thank God. It was enough that Percy was alive and had a mind of his own.
Flashlight at the ready, I entered through the movable shelves in my bathroom. A light came on the minute I stepped through. I turned back to Percy. “For real? You can’t come in here?”
A multitude of black vines snaked across the bathroom wall, twisting and curling over the surface, stopping at some invisible barrier between the privy and the narrow hallway.
I reached across the threshold and wrapped one around my finger. “It’s okay. I’ll be right back.”
He let me go. A good sign in my book. If the passageways were dangerous, he would’ve tried to stop me. At least, that’s what I told myself. A false sense of security was better than no sense of security—especially when it came to watering down my fear.
The only thing in the hallway besides the wall sconces was the camera my dads had installed to keep an eye on me while I slept. The walls were lined with whitewashed shiplap that smelled of sea and salt and brine, making me wonder if the wood really came from a boat.
The maze behind the walls seemed to access every room in the house. One set of narrow stairs traveled over rooms and halls to get to the next. Trailing up and down throughout the entire manor, some walkways were no more than four feet high.
One even took me all the way to the basement. Or at least I thought I was in the basement. The musty scent of earth hit me as I descended a thousand steps farther than should be possible. Somehow, I’d gone deeper even than the rooms downstairs. I was underneath them. And there were no lights down here.
Turning on the flashlight, I tugged on a thin wooden door. The rusted hinges squeaked in protest, then opened into a cave.
An explorer’s wet dream, rock walls lined a massive cavern. Water pooled in several places, as though the sea was somehow getting in. The floor to the house above me had been braced with massive, smoothly finished columns.
Cool air brushed over my skin. It flowed from one side of the cavern to the other, and I swore I heard waves lapping against rocks nearby. Turning, I felt the wall beside me. It was damp and smelled like salt. But we were over half a mile from the ocean. So, where were the waves coming from?
I couldn’t see without going deeper inside. I bit back the urge to call out “Is anyone there?” I’d seen more than one movie about people who explored creepy, dark rooms alone at night. Visions of entrails had me backing away. No matter how brightly my curiosity burned, it would have to wait. I could come down tomorrow during the day to see if any sunlight filtered through.
I was just about to hightail it out of there when an apparition walked out of the darkness—a woman shrouded in silver—and I almost ruined a perfectly good pair of underwear. As it was, I suffered a small arrest of my left ventricle. But that was less humiliating. A story I could actually tell at parties. I clicked off the flashlight as quietly as I could.
But the apparition heard it and turned. She didn’t need the light. She came with her own luminescence.
Dropping the flashlight, I stumbled back in horror, a scream about to rip from my throat—
“Defiance?”
“Ruthie?” Retrieving the light, I beamed it at her.
She blinked. “What are you doing down here?”
“What am I doing down here?” I put a hand over my heart attack. “What are you doing down here?” Foregoing the safety of the last stair, I stepped into the cave but held onto the doorframe for dear life, my nails digging into the wood.
“I’m just . . . I was thinking.” Her glow softened.
“Thinking about what? How this place is creepy AF?” Though, with the right designer, it would make a fantastic mass grave. Or a dungeon for a serial-killer. Or even a summer lair for Shelob. Moving the light off Ruthie, I bounced it around the cave. “Does this lead somewhere?”
Her slippers silent on the dirt floor, she drifted toward me.
“Have you ever been down this deep?”
She scanned the cavern. “Defiance, until a few days ago, those stairs ended at the basement.”
I stilled. Considered how my day was going. Backed up and planted my foot on the last step. The vines, the six-month stint in suspended animation, the fact that my dead grandmother was alive again I could handle. But stairs that magically appeared overnight and led to a cave underneath a house I’d just inherited from a witch? Nope.
“This was not here,” she continued, oblivious to my mental breakdown that would be talked about for generations to come. “At least not that I know of.
”
I backed up another step. It creaked beneath my foot.
“I think it leads all the way to the waterfront. Do you hear the waves?”
And one more for good measure.
Like Ruthie had suddenly caught some of the fear I’d been projecting, she turned toward me. “Defiance, yes, go back upstairs. Hurry.”
She did not have to tell me twice. I turned and flew up the stairs, stumbling and scraping my shins more than once, until I got to the very top. Only then did I realize I was lost. And dying. I hadn’t done cardio in months, and that was before my sabbatical snooze.
My breath wheezed in and out as I tried several of the doors, pushing as hard as I could to get in. None of them would open. Probably a good thing. Knowing someone could sneak into my room at night was disturbing as Dante’s hell.
At the end of a very long hall, I came to yet another set of stairs that led up, but I was already on the top floor. The second floor. So how did that work?
I reconstructed Percy from memory. The main section was round with six black gables that formed a circle. The front door, and the bay windows on either side, faced the street. Another section, square but just as stunning, was attached on the right, shorter when one considered the gables. Did Percy have an attic above to even out the dungeon below?
I turned on my flashlight and took the stairs slowly, because . . . that cardio thing, as the steps shrunk and narrowed more than the rest. They groaned and squeaked under my weight, ripping up my self-esteem and handing it back in the form of one huge-ass complex. Twenty stairs later, I emerged inside a round, windowless room with the same salty shiplap and wood floor.
Gazing up, I turned full circle. A high, pointed ceiling topped the room that coned down to meet six doors. They were evenly spaced, creating a perfect ring around the common area. The distressed wood had seen better days, and the floor creaked when I walked across it, but it was solid like the rest of Percy.
The doors were rather small, as though meant for a child. I tried each one of the vintage doorknobs, all of them locked. The keyholes proved it would take a skeleton key to open them, which I did not have. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland,” I said to absolutely no one.
I tried again, this time using a different technique. After checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was looking, I lifted a hand and drew a symbol on the door closest to me.
Light burst out of the lines I’d drawn, radiating bright and hot.
Pressing my hand to the door, I pushed that light past it and into the room and scanned the area with a searching energy. At first, all it found was a vast nothingness. Far too vast to simply be a room.
Then something scratched. Scratched my energy. Scratched me.
I pulled the energy back, but the thing’s claws sank in. It buried its teeth and wouldn’t let go. My eyes flew open as I tried to pry my hand off the door. It wouldn’t let me. Keeping me glued to the spot, it catapulted toward me. A darkness, cold and angry. I felt it rocket through space like a cannon. I struggled to free my hand, and it let go without warning a microsecond before it slammed into the door.
I stumbled back, tripping on my own feet, and covered my face with my arms, expecting to be blasted with shards of splintered wood. But the only thing that fell on me was dust from the rafters above.
Amazed I was still alive, I patted myself down then scrambled to the stairs, half-running, half-falling. I tried to find my way out.
All the steps down and all the steps up formed a zig-zag of mazes that Jareth would be proud to install in his goblin castle.
After a short eternity, where I got lost several more times—honestly, the house wasn’t that big—I emerged from a panel strategically placed behind a potted plant on the mezzanine. My room was only a few doors down. But if my calculations were correct, this two-story, or three if one counted the attic, was actually thirty stories high. And a million feet deep.
Gawd, I was bad at math. Next time, I’d bring Annette.
Still, either this house sat directly on top of a hellmouth or my ancestors were into way more than just shipping.
Chest heaving, mostly because of the cardio thing, I closed the panel and pressed against the wall. Having Percy around calmed my nerves. I drew in several deep breaths, wondering how no one was awake. How no one had heard the crash of the house almost falling down around us. How that small door stayed on its hinges.
A clock ticking downstairs was the only sound coming from the belly of the beast, also known as the first floor. I crept down the stairs, careful not to awaken anything that might be lurking in the dark, and headed for the kitchen. A place of nourishment and respite. A place where both friends and memories were made. A place where pineapple upside-down cake lived, waiting in the shadows, beckoning me closer.
I needed sustenance. And sugar. Mostly sugar. And I deserved it, damn it. I was living in some bizarre interdimensional hellhole, no offense to Percy. And cake would help. Cake always helped.
With hands still shaking from the evening’s events, I felt around until I found the light above the industrial strove and turned it on, ready to begin a new quest that did not involve hidden passageways or secret dungeons or creepy rooms that linked directly to the seventh circle of hell.
If I were a pineapple upside-down cake . . .
“It’s over here.”
I jumped 12.2 feet into the air and whirled around with a hand over my heart to find a highlander sitting on the counter like he’d been raised in the wild. Then again, he had.
He held a fork and a small plate and was taking bites out of a piece of the very cake that had been calling to me. In between said bites, a grin as sinful as my deepest desires lifted one corner of his exquisite mouth.
Obviously, we’d had the same idea.
With zero confirmation, he reached around, took another dessert plate out of the cabinet, and held it out to me.
I walked forward and took it.
He cut me a piece of cake, lifting it carefully onto my plate.
“Maybe I’m here for the carnitas,” I said.
“The way you were making love to this cake with your eyes? I don’t think so.”
Heat infused my face. Why was I constantly going red around him? Thankfully, the room was still dark enough to cover for me even with the stove light on. Unless . . . “Can you see in the dark?” He could come in handy.
He grinned. “Worried?”
“No. Maybe. A little.” I put the plate down and hopped onto the counter—not an easy feat—putting the cake pan between us. “Did you know this house lives on top of a cave?”
“No, but that explains a lot.”
“And there are six doors at the top of the stairs in the secret passageways.”
“Yeah. I tried opening them. They won’t budge.”
“It’s a good thing. I think they lead to hell or something. Or at the very least, one of its outer offices. This house is getting more disturbing by the minute.”
The countertop quaked beneath me.
“Sorry, Percy. I didn’t mean it that way.” I decided to shut up and eat my cake. It melted in my mouth. No matter how much I despised the word, moist was the best way to describe it. And rich. And delicious. I may have moaned.
Roane laughed softly and handed me a cup of coffee he poured from the pot sitting on his other side.
I swallowed, the bitter taste blending with the sweetness from the cake almost orgasmic. I took another drink, then said, “And you didn’t answer my first question.”
“I can’t be certain, but I do think I see better in the dark than humans.”
“Okay, that’s the coolest thing I’ve heard all day.”
“The coolest thing I’ve heard was that you woke up.”
I thwarted an exhilarated grin by taking another bite. “I’m sorry,” I said, my mouth half full.
He stopped and looked over at me. “For what?”
“Making everyone worry.”
“Yeah, because that was
your fault.”
“You know what I mean.”
He hopped off the counter and put his plate in the sink. “Since we’re both very aware you did not lose your powers, what’s up with that?”
“Are you calling me a liar?” I asked, pretending to be appalled, right before I shoveled in another bite.
He put the plastic cover on the cake and turned to me. “Big, fat, and bald-faced.” Coming from any other man, I would’ve taken that as an insult. But Roane could’ve mistaken me for ET, and I still would’ve ovulated.
He studied me, his gaze full of challenge. And humor. Mostly humor.
A warmth spread low in my abdomen. “That last spell must’ve been too much for my system.” I shrugged. “The powers just vanished.”
In all honesty, I had no idea what lying about my powers was going to accomplish. That would take introspection I didn’t want to introspect at the moment. I mean, obviously, the big bad dark coming after me had something to do with it. Sure, I’d been unconscious when I’d seen it, so one could argue that I’d imagined it. But it felt real enough to have me scurrying into a corner for six months.
Ruthie had said there were other witches, warlocks even, who would stop at nothing to get a charmling’s powers. Was that what I’d seen? What I still felt? What Percy fought against for me? Was it as simple as a warlock seeking the ultimate power high? Perhaps. Except somehow it felt more personal.
“Fine,” Roane acquiesced. “Then we need to get them back.”
His nearness caused my breaths to quicken. “My powers?”
A dimple appeared on one side of his mouth. “Your powers.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I dropped my gaze and bit the bullet while changing the subject at the same time. Two birds. One stone. “I owe you an apology first, anyway.”
“Yeah?” He walked to another cabinet on the other side of the massive kitchen and took down a box.
“About earlier.” I put the last bites of cake on the counter and closed my eyes. “I—I can’t believe I did that. Said that.” I could believe I’d thought it. “I’m so sorry. I thought I was dreaming, but that’s no excuse. Especially since, you know, I wasn’t.”
Bewitched: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Novel (Betwixt & Between Book 2) Page 5