The Nebulizer Potion and the Electric Compass (Vampire DeAngeliuson Book 3)

by Kara Skye Smith

The complet-er secret?...Secret revealed?

  The Witch set Jessica up. Full on and never ending, a vampire can't tell his own doo-doo in a snowstorm, as the Witch would say. But, when a witch has called, then tempted the very being, a mess up like that is most likely a set-up. As a vampire? You are basically and ethically damaged. It is not the time to fall from lofty goals, undoing goodness; however, to put it bluntly, Jessica messed up. As a vampire goody two-shoes she’s squeezed. Got to do what she says. A relatively innocent feed for a young vampire in a mixed-mortality marriage learning to curb her ancient calling in order to maintain a moderate, mortal lifestyle is hardly enough to loosen the foundation upon which the inter-afterlife couple’s warm, worm-wood bed rests; she thinks, as she snuggles in, later that morning. This feed, in the light of the Witch's eye, already on her, was the set-up - the bubbling cauldron - into which she fell.

  The difference between Jessica and Ickabod, or her Father - or, even Theopolis - is that they would have known, once the summons was sent, the Witch's eye was not to be unwaried with – ON – already watching. From the moment a witch thinks to summons, to the moment the meeting adjourns, she's still watching, waiting, and setting her lair, once she has called the vampire, until she gets out; and, good luck if she’s fed in between, there. Well, Jessica did and the Witch knew it. Frickin' knew it. And covered Jessica on it; only to get her to the In Between - into her trap. That feed, a moment of weakness Jessica would rather forget, allowed the Witch a watching potion (sacrifice made); so that, she had the 'unfair advantage' of watching Jessica from that moment on to the moment she arrived through the Witch hut’s twiggly gate and into the very same kitchen of Tyrannomous Slater's very last breath.

  Fallacy #4: Jessica's cry is the cry any other vampire who hears it can simply ignore. False; hence the deplorable Witch is justly interrupted in her attempt to do away with Jessica as she has zero tolerance and even less patience. She has jumped the gun on killing, opting out of waiting for Theopolis to arrive simply because Jessica annoyed her. Silly Witches! Goats are for kids. Vampires are why, preferably, the world works on the level of high-fashion and good taste rather than nose warts, toad stew, and flying broomsticks.

  The vocals - now near Panic in their pitch - from Jessica, are heard more clearly from the Underworld Castle, where Nostramadeus returns to vampire form just after he hones in to realize, “The frequency’s coming from the Witch's hut. O, lux-star-boot-heels! That Witch has an Underworld captive tied up, again! Well, this will not take long. As yes, I've been there before, to do just the same thing, release the captive and teach that Witch a lesson - vampires rule the Underworld. Witches, if just, rule trolls. If only she could remember that simple fact. Tedious chore, witches are,” he says to the Waiter, standing near him, who smiles, only half listening.

  At the Witch's hut, the Witch chops bunches of herbs with a cleaver on a wooden chopping block as she babbles on to Jessica about her plans.

  “First, I'll chop your feet and make a delicious ‘traveling brew’. Then, your hands - make great offer on your hands, usually, a pretty girl like you. You wouldn't have come yourself, with business matters of obligation and completion of the duties at hand if you weren't the type to bring great offer on your hands. A comely price,” she grumbles aloud. Jessica sighs and groans, so angry and helpless at this moment she almost cries, though she won’t lower herself - or her kind - in front of the Witch. All at once she remembers the piece of paper from Theopolis, lying in her pocket. Jessica clears her throat to interrupt, the Witch, talking loudly over the babbled out plans about piece mealing and high-pricing the bits of her vampire corpse (ever insensitive, afterall, she is still alive - and sitting right here! How rude!)

  Jessica speaks, “If I could just get to that piece of paper in my pocket, or remember -”

  “What?!” the Witch stops making her mental list, arrests her cleaver from chopping, and looks at Jessica, “What are you droning on about?” Jessica, unaware her approach might not work here, chooses to reiterate her vampire status (all the while the Witch thinks, simply, “La de-da da da!”

  Jessica implores, “My father will hat you for this; and, he can tell you this, himself, from right here, in my pocket. Could you just, please, listen, to what he has to say? Get the compass from out of my pocket, here. You are under the orders of a supreme being, here in the Underworld, you know. He'll tell you to stop this at once! If you don't believe me, why won't you just look? Just open it and see what he says.”

  The Witch gazes at her and remarks, “O, the pleading.... This moment is always the same. The bargaining, the cries of rank, the begging... A last request. I suppose, I could open it. It might sell, and in case I don't know how to work the thing, I'll be able to ask you now, because I can’t ask you once you're gone. I'll want to know, so now is better than dead, I guess. Okay, Witch pocket? Or is it which pocket? That's a joke.”

  “This one,” Jessica bends her head toward a strapped on purse, “Open it.” The Witch snaps it off by snipping the cord with the cleaver.

  “Hum, velvet. Uppity plasma slurpers. Let's see here,“ She opens the pouch and pulls out the Electric Compass. She opens it.

  “Curses!!“ She slams it shut and glares at Jessica, “You didn't warn me!!”

  “I did! Open it again. Listen to what he says,” Jessica insists.

  The Witch looks back at the chopped and bundled herbs and then at Jessica, “I can't!” she appears flustered, “he won't like this,” she looks around the hut, perhaps remembering the rescue of a vampire, which took place, here, in the past.

  “I'm his daughter!” Jessica says, “What did you think he was going to do if you would have actually,” she looks down near her left shoe, “pulled this off?”

  “I might have gotten carried away,” the Witch tells herself rather than Jessica.

  Jessica hammers her best point home rationalizing with some sort of desperate logic is her only defense, at the moment.

  “How are you going to do away with nine vampires?” Jessica counts out her lineage, “There's me, o, but in your opinion, I'm an easy target,“ she continues “my Father, highest ranking vampire in the land, Ickabod, wealthiest, Theopolis-” the Witch puts both hands to the side of her face and shrieks, “STOP!!!”

  Jessica instructs the confused Witch, “Open it! Listen to what he says.”

  “I can't! I won't. You're just one. No one will know. I'll tell them…”

  “He Knows!” Jessica interrupts, “He's in there. He told me to come here, to the Underworld, to talk to you. He's hanging…”

  The Witch's jaw tenses, “I know!”

  “Yes, I suppose, I have told you - not sure you were listening, but rather ranting, instead.”

  “I don't care,” the Witch says, “he won't know about this. It will look like an accident.” She raises the cleaver and walks toward Jessica’s feet. She picks Jessica's foot up in her hand. Jessica begins to scream and cry - a cry so ancient it pierces the air - sharp, clamorous, yet with a resonant hush - permeating several dimensions; startling the Witch who falls back in a chair.

  Just as all good vampires (oxymoron, here) do, when they cry, a primal call escapes; and, as Jessica’s Father had often implored her to understand, in the Row-Sham-Bow of Underworld beings, Vampire is the paper to the Witch’s rock, anyday! The emotion Jessica feels while the ever-so-determined hag-of-the-ages lunges at her shrieking form with the cleaver, turns her to bat form - without even having to remember the directions - upon that very split-second that its carefully sharpened blade touches Jessica’s vampire skin.

  “No!! No!!” The Witch screams as Jessica’s ‘bat’ dive bombs and swoops near the nesty, frazzled Witch’s ‘do. The door busts open.

  “HELP!!” The Witch clutches the cleaver tainted now with its one unjustly drawn drop of young, vampire blood in an area where vampires have built castles and eco-systems for all to watch - the one, true dimension of all six dimensions where vampire blood is never to be drawn. The
Witch hisses at the large figure of a man in the shadow of the doorway; his cape a-flutter in the wind.

  “Nostramadeus!!” the Witch breathes out in fear.

  L'ornomichaelis Nostramadeus, the most ancient and most beguiling of all Underworld Castle vampires inquires of the hag – who has become more than just an acquaintance at this point, “Witch’s brew?”

  The Witch grumbles out her explanation, “She’s a worker; a nobody. Nope, not a blood suck-, ah, I mean to say, she’s not a vampire. Why do you care? Go! I'll have it delivered when ready.”

  “No!! I'm a vampire!“ Jessica cries her vampire shriek throughout the hut, haunting in bat form (well done). She suddenly remembers - without the piece of paper - the words Theopolis had taught her, and she returns from bat form into the young, yet suddenly grown-up, vampire she’s become. (I am so proud!)

  Nostramadeus becomes enraged, at the obvious trick of the Witch. Although appearing to serve him a brew, she’d had one of his own in need of a rescue - from her! Flashing a fiery glance at the Witch, he picks up Jessica’s left hand, “Let me see this hand!!“ the hand which bears the ring of her marriage. The ring Drew knew to give her with metal from the Vortex, which held a promise to keep her safe when he, or her father could not be with her.

  “Where did you get this ring?” the great vampire asks, testing her status; but, Jessica cannot answer him - no time.

  “Duck!” Jessica yells looking at the Witch behind him, “She's...got… the knife!!”

  L'ornomichaelis jumps aside as the cleaver just misses his head.

  “Bat form!!” he suggests and does; his last audible words before going bat (to Jessica) are, “No time!” (Exactly.) Jessica watches his bat form fly around the room.

  “I can't! I don't remember!“ (Ah well, one milestone at a time, I suppose.) The Witch goes for her broom.

  “I'll swat those bat brains right out of you!“ She swears and grabs onto the wooden handle, and then turns to battle him. Nostramadeus grabs onto the broom handle, too. The Witch and the distinguished vampire dance a sort of two shakes up, two shakes down, step left, step right dance when snap, the broom handle breaks.

  The Witch wails, “My broom!!” toward the ceiling of the hut, nearly shaking it from its foundation. Clinging to her end of the stick, she runs for the door of the hut to escape. Jessica sticks out her leg, the very one that would have been poached in a brew, by now, if Old Nostramadeus hadn't answered her cry. The Witch falls flat onto the floor, nearly impaling herself on the broken broomstick handle. The vampire, looming tall over her splatted form grabs the Witch by the back of the neck in one, spiny snag and lifts her up to his level to look her in eyes.

  Nostramadeus whispers an entrancement charm which seems to stun her for a minute. He takes a deep breath and holds his nose - as if he is about to drive through an area that stinks - bares his fangs and lunges toward the Witch's neck.

  Jessica yells, “It won't work!! She's an ancient! Stop! No!”

  The daunting vampire halts his near mistake, mid-lunge, his fangs one millimeter from the old Norse neck and says, “So am I, but even I can't lunch on evil fog.” He reaches for the cleaver with his open hand, a limp Witch held tightly in the other hand.

  The Witch finally manages to protest, “You'll be sorry! Let me go!” she says, her usual quick to spout-off tongue bound through the lure of the enchantment. At least she was happy, and rather numb when it ‘happened’ as vampires - even the most ancient, dark souls - aren’t cruel about their feeds, or worse yet, their offerings. This Witch, however, is no form to reckon with, and an impossible being to trust. She had been cruel to Jessica, so, with one swift hack, the Witch nearly deflates, by blow of the cleaver. An eery trail of smokey spires swirl around the Witch's corpse, as if a gas leak at the local foundry was adrift in the room. The two, Underworld vampires cover their mouths and run out through the open door. Jessica reaches in her pocket for the cherished piece of paper Theopolis had given to her. Nostramadeus, turns to look at her, when Jessica – his most recent rescue - points to the little piece of life's instructions.

  “Bat,” Jessica explains. She raises her eyebrows in question as to suggest it. Nostramadeus, the most ancient vampire of his line, sighs at her.

  “O, noobians!“ he groans.

  Jessica looks up at him, suddenly awed by his divine sanction - in other words, at last realizing he has just saved her - and asks, “Who are you?”

  Nostramadeus simply replies, “Let's go!“ He bat-forms while she reads the instructions and follows along. They fly off against the looming spires of the Underworld Castle in the distance.

  Chapter Ten

  Escape is Not the Time to Reminisce

  At the site where the Witch lies, and then all down the dusty lane, rippling throughout the Underworld, some unbelievable things begin to happen:

  The Witch hut’s twiggly gate unwinds into three children who run off down the cottage-lined lane holding hands and laughing.

  The Domina-shaped hole, mid-street in the shopping district - patched in seven times with fill-dirt over the years, yet remained a sink hole to remind people of the old Witch’s power in the Underworld - suddenly fills in with blooming flowers and buzzing bees, pollinating almost in sing-song - a funeral dirge with an upbeat twist (something that sounds like ‘ding-dong the Witch is dead’). It's just happiness all over!

  Frogs walk, single file off the Witch’s shelf in a little song-and-dance; and a spider leaves a vat of butter – the Witch had tried to pass off as a love spell – by wriggling its way out, running off to join the freedom parade out the dusty door of dirty, rotten spells. A woman, caught in an old-time photograph, in a far off corner of an attic somewhere, walks out of the photograph - hopefully going, first off, to buy herself some updated clothing.

  Flying out, with new-found freedom - the wind beneath her wings - Jessica lands in the In Between’s gulch, ironically, the very location where the first crime took place. She thinks, a bit nostalgic, about Theopolis in her favorite portal to the Upper World, and wonders if he’ll ever know how she had just, sort-of, saved his life.

  She stops and with these thoughts, emotes into human form. Nostramadeus stops, too, when he sees Jessica change, to touch down onto gulch ground.

  “What is this pit-stop about?” he asks, dusting himself off.

  He looks around with an immediate, disagreeable reaction to the landscape, “This is not a place I would not have chosen to grace or light down.”

  Jessica continues searching, “Around, here, somewhere - here, there is a tree. A ‘Witch Tree’ is what I used to call it - before I knew. You see, the old Witch - revealed a secret during the horrendous line of questioning that I was forced to endure. She said she had changed a woman whom she had once held captive - whom she also said reminded her of me - into a tree. I used to see this tree during transport to the Castle; and, once, it whispered to me. It told me how to get out of the Underworld from here. Theopolis and I were nearly stuck - forever! - in the In Between. She's here, somewhere. Can we?” Jessica pauses to look at the high-ranking vampire who is looking at his watch, rather inconvenienced by this stop-over Jessica has chosen to make.

  She explains sincerely, “I thought maybe we could get her out, now that the Witch is dead. Could you help me?” Nostramadeus sighs and rubs his forehead. He looks around.

  “I don't dabble in the likes of spells,” he says, “and I don't know exactly who we'd be getting out; in other words, I'd rather not. I've got a cribbage game to get to and a well-fed cribbage partner - don't want to keep her waiting.“ Jessica turns to the side, still looking.

  “Wait,” the old vampire says, looking at Jessica in the cast light of the In Between, “the Witch said you reminded her of the woman she’d cast into a tree?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Hmm,” he says, “Well, maybe. Two minutes. Look, look, look. Ah, there!“ He points to a spindly little seedling, barely propped up by hope. (Trees are sparse in the dusty g
ulch of the In Between.)

  “No,” Jessica says, “Like this,” she poses, “but as if she were wearing a witch hat with pointy boots, and,” Just then Jessica stops talking, her jaw drops open and Nostramadeus watches silently as a woman, rather like Jessica, walks out into the middle of the gulch where the two stand ten paces off from each other. She looks at Jessica and then turns her back and faces the old vampire, Nostramadeus, whom she had met once before, unbeknownst to Jessica.

  “Looking for me?” she asks, “I’m free!” she exclaims, “I think the Witch is dead!”

  Nostramadeus points at Jessica, “She was - looking for you,” he explains. Domina glances over her shoulder but does not allow the diversion of his attentions.

  “I am glad to see you have escaped the evil spell,” Jessica tells her.

  Domina asks him, “Did you rescue me?”

  “I did. I think, well, to tell you the truth, I just wandered in. I didn't quite know what to expect,” he starts to tell, the woman, already working up an enchanting story line about his involvement.

  “I see,” Domina smiles at Jessica, “That Witch can be unbearably nasty, and a time spent in that hut, quite harrowing to say the least... O! what am I saying? She was downright frightful! She's dead now!” she turns to Nostramadeus and holds out her arms like the tree she had been for many years (and incidentally, all of Jessica’s childhood), “See? I have been released. There is no hex upon me, now!” she puts her arms down to her sides and surrenders, “The Witch is dead.”

  Nostramadeus suddenly remembers just where and who about Domina, “O, please, hear me out. I never knew,” he instinctively starts to excuse himself, “of any wrong-doing or neglect. Just hear me out on this. I would not have allowed her to keep you, here. O, desolate souls from an old wand’s hand!” he holds his head in his hands, “I tried, that day, to catch you - as you fell, but... I failed, Domina! I am so sorry you had to - you know,” he points where the tree might have been and tries the pose Jessica had showed him, “this,” rather than say the word ‘tree’.