by A. J. Aalto
I nailed her with a here-we-go gaze, slapping my bare palm to the orb. She covered my hand with her own small, damp, slightly trembling one.
Lavinia was in a small motel room with all too familiar cheap furnishings, sitting on the edge of the bed, sobbing with relief into her hands. Behind her on the nubbly bed spread that might once have been white, a hairy little goblin — the glaistyn, my memory provided — danced from one foot to the other. Lavinia’s thoughts ran clear into my head, They’ll deal with it, it’s done, just stop, it’s almost over… Convincing the glaistyn? Convincing herself? Fighting an urge, my gut instinct said. But not her own urge. She felt… “Owned,” I whispered. “Enslaved.”
“She doesn’t want Ruby’s grimoire,” I said to no one in particular. That ran opposite to what Wes had read from her mind; he told me they all wanted it, they were all eager for the power.
But more importantly than that was the realization that Ruby’s grimoire didn’t want Lavinia, either. Once I made that connection, the problem grew. Lavinia was fighting the draw, but so was Ruby’s grimoire. Something wanted the two together, and they were fighting the inevitable. The book and Lavinia were drawn to one another by some sick twist of fate, and despite how she portrayed herself, Lavinia did not want the grimoire Bonded to her. And yet, the temptation to have it was also there, the urge Wes had picked up from her was every bit as strong as the others. The conflict—I want it, I shouldn’t, it belongs with me, it doesn’t want me—was a storm inside Lavinia, a dangerous one, a riptide that could yank her out into unfathomable depths.
Something shook low in my belly, something important that I just couldn’t see yet, and it was never wise to ignore that. Had Lavinia watched the black magic consume Ruby in a way she could not face for her own future? Was she meant to have it next? What would Lavinia do with it, if she inherited the grimoire and all that power?
“More, Blanche,” I said, readjusting my palm and drawing my focus to cut through resistance. “Deeper.”
Blanche wavered but allowed it. “I feel it only fair to warn you, I’m not getting anything myself, even though I’m trying. My link keeps slipping.”
I flicked her an annoyed look and warned, “Well, buckle up, buttercup. Marnie’s behind the wheel now and I’m taking this to eleven.”
Her mouth popped open but she didn’t actively fight me. I drew my hand from under hers and slapped it on top instead, forcing her palm to the orb. I felt the slow curl of my own power stirring as I drew on a healthy dose of psi, drawing it up like a spike through my belly, pushing the heat down my shaking arms. There was a familiar snap-spark and the unmistakable perfume of burnt sugar and molasses, the scent of undead influence as I tapped into the reservoir of revenant magic from the dead guys slumbering under my protection in VK-Delta below. Wes’s powers were a weak, thin stream, shifting as he lingered in a shallow, early death. I sank deeper into Harry’s passive stream of power, mostly just to see how deep I could go before the chill overtook me; my own hot tide of psi swirled almost painfully in my veins as Harry’s influence joined the pool, and the flesh of my hand began to cool. Blanche’s eyes darted unhappily but I tightened my grip on her.
I let my eyelids close and used both of my Talents to see through Blanche into Lavinia’s mind; this was a far clearer connection. Lavinia paced, anxious for the petitions to be over, anxious to be gone and away from here, feeling burdened. Her heart ached, physically ached in her chest like a throbbing wound. The glaistyn paced across the bed in the same five steps-turn-five steps, mimicking her shaking head, but I couldn’t tell how the little goblin felt, nor could Blanche.
The sliding door of my herb cabinet rattled loudly with impact and I broke contact with Blanche, who drew her hand into the other for a warming rub. The door rattled again, and I sensed it was let me out rather than let me in. The grimoire was trying to escape.
“What’s going on, Blanche?” I demanded, marching into my office with Blanche close on my heels. “Why does Lavinia not want this grimoire if it’s so packed with valuable information?”
She shook her head. “She spoke to us for hours on how important it was that one of us receives it. That we had to—” She broke off and tried again. “That it was important. Priceless. Irreplaceable.”
“She talked it up?” I asked. “Convinced you?”
“She didn’t really have to do much convincing,” Blanche said. “We all jumped at the opportunity. We know its value. It’s a treasure. Whoever Bonds to it…”
I waited, but she didn’t seem to know how to finish that, offering her empty hands in a helpless gesture.
“Whoever Bonds to it…?” I prodded.
Blanche just shook her head rapidly. I felt the sudden need for a gallon of espresso just the way Harry made it, with a shot or twelve of his good brandy. It was barely noon and this had already been one of the longest days of my life. You are drawing on the wrong source of power, that papery whisper scolded. The dead cannot protect your life. We must do it together.
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit, and when the herb cabinet door rocked angrily again, I grumbled, “I bet the One Ring of Sauron was less annoying than this fuckin’ thing.”
Blanche’s eyes widened. “You’re not the first to make that comparison. I heard Ruby’s daughter say something like that, too.”
Danika Sherlock. The warped, demon-manipulated psychic who stabbed me in the very room in which Lavinia was currently pacing; the only new thing in Room Four was the carpeting, a dark grey Berber, already stained and matted.
“None of you wondered why Lavinia wasn’t petitioning for the grimoire herself?” I asked. “Her reason seemed pretty vague. She said she wasn’t chosen. How did you choose who would petition for it?”
“We just discussed it. We decided we all would.”
“Everyone but Lavinia.”
“Right.” Blanche hesitated, eyes wary. “Is there something wrong with the book?”
“Blanche!” I shouted. “There’s so much wrong with it. It’s all wrong. But you guys are black witches, you deal in wrong! I thought you wanted the wrong!”
“I meant harmful.”
“Again, black magic,” I stressed. “All. Harmful.”
She shifted in her shoes. “But I mean, harmful to the caster.”
“Yes!” I bellowed. “All black magic is harmful to the caster!”
She huffed and stamped one foot, clenching her fists into balls. “You don’t — I meant more harmful to the caster than usual!” she shouted back. “Why is Lavinia more afraid of Mrs. Valli’s grimoire than of her own or anyone else’s? That doesn’t make sense.”
The cabinet door rattled in front of me violently. “And what also doesn’t make sense, Blanche, is why Ruby’s grimoire doesn’t want Lavinia. Lavinia isn’t even petitioning. This thing is actively trying to escape.”
Blanche’s gaze cut down to the shiny orb in her hand and her breath hitched in. “She’s coming.”
My veins went cold and my heart stopped for a split second, my breath whooshing out at the same pace as my logic. “Ruby?” I said with mindless dread.
“No.” Blanche’s head shook back and forth strongly enough to toss her ginger hair from around her shoulders. “Lavinia. She doesn’t want to, but she’s—”
“She has to have it,” I finished. “It’s the glaistyn. It’s forcing her hand. What does it want, the little bugger?”
“I don’t know a thing about the creature.”
“Why the hell not?” I demanded. “How could you be around something like that without learning about it? That’s basic safety preparations.”
“It hasn’t been around for very long,” she said defensively.
“Oh?” I double-checked the lock on the herb cabinet and went to the small vault under my desk to get my gun. “When did Lavinia get the glaistyn?”
“It showed up during one of our forest walks,” she said. “She found it.”
“Did she find it,” I asked, “or di
d it find you?”
“It walked out of the trees during one of Gus’s walking spells,” she said, and I sensed no deception.
“What kind of spell did Gus cast?”
Now Blanche had to work to jog her memory. She made a sound like she was giving it her best effort. “A protection chant, to ward off danger.”
I knew very little about glaistyn, but so many other species of goblin ran the spectrum from trickster all the way to man-eating nightmare that I had to assume there was some risk. “Did you guys decide to come for the grimoire before or after the glaistyn showed up?”
“After,” Blanche said, grimacing as though she wish she’d noticed that connection before. “She’s bringing it here now. The glaistyn. It’s with her.”
“On it!” I said, loading my gun just in case, and showing it to her. I checked that the safety was on and shoved it in my waistband at the small of my back.
Blanche made an uncertain little noise. I started humming the theme music from Mission: Impossible to encourage her. It didn’t seem to work, so I started some air guitar and sung-whispered the refrain from Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog.” I threw the horns for good measure. Her eyes grew wide with alarm.
“What are you going to do?” she hissed accusingly, like she already knew I was planning something stupid. I pointed forcefully at my bald-as-a-super-villain scalp as if so say something-awesome-duh and we both dropped into a crouch.
“We have the upper hand,” I whispered at her, crawling to the wall to inch up and slap the light switch to off. “She doesn’t know we’re onto her.”
Blanche watched me crawl all the way back under the kitchen table and motion for her to join me, and her dark eyebrows knit in dismay. “Oh, gawd,” she blurted.
“Yeah, I hear that a lot,” I admitted. “Get under here.”
She shook her head. “Just call your vampires back upstairs,” she suggested.
“Fuck vampires!” I spat, ignoring the dreaded V-word. “I don’t need vampires, woman. This bitch doesn’t know who she’s messin’ with. Haven’t you witches ever heard of my infamous exploits? I’ve got this.”
I heard Wes whisper from the pantry. “Marnie! Yoohoo!”
Balls. “I thought you were at rest!”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I have a tummy ache.”
“What the fuck are you, a three year old? I told you to lay off the sour gummy bears for breakfast,” I chided. “Now go away, I’m dealing with a crisis.”
“How ‘bout I get the spork cannon?” Wes asked.
I scowled at the dark doorway. “We don’t need a spork cannon!”
“Okay. Lemme hack her phone and make her GPS Canadian instead,” he suggested excitedly.
I felt my lips shrink into a frustrated pinch and barely got out, “How. Will. That. Help?”
“Calculating kilometers-to-miles will keep her distracted!” Wes crawled past us, hair flopping in his eyes, into my office to get to my laptop.
“Can he really do that?” Blanche wanted to know, cocking her head.
“I don’t—how would that even—” I cried. “It doesn’t matter! She’ll still get here!”
“We should get that cannon thing,” Blanche suggested, “before Lavinia makes her move.”
“I don’t think supplying her with copious amounts of flying plastic cutlery is going to block her move. Also, hello, I have a real gun. With actual bullets.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” Wes called from my office, and came crawling back out. “I can’t hack her phone anyway; I don’t know how. I’ll be right back!” Then he knee-shuffled into the pantry and there was a quick pause before a series of muffled thuds meant he’d pulled a Marnie down the stairs.
Blanche’s eyes cut sideways at me. “Your kin?”
“Never met him before,” I lied. “Okay, here’s the plan.”
The only hitch in that statement was that I didn’t have a plan. No problem. She’s waiting for a plan, I’ll think up a plan. My brain gears turned over. Think, Marnie. “We know Lavinia doesn’t want it, but she’s coming to get it. Maybe we can simply talk her down.” That way, I don’t have to shoot her.
“What about the glaistyn?”
“We punt it,” I suggested with a shrug. “It might be bitey, but I’ve got knee-high boots.”
“Wait,” Blanche said, “Why exactly don’t we want Lavinia to have it?”
I squinted. “If she doesn’t want it and it doesn’t want her, doesn’t it make sense that it’s a bad idea to put those two things together?”
“Bad for whom?” Blanche reasoned. “Bad for us?”
“No?” I said uncertainly.
“Bad for Lavinia?”
“Maybe?”
And then that papery little whisper said, Bad for everyone, everyone will suffer, but it was a lie, and I tasted it like a wad of spoiled meat on my tongue. “Not bad for everyone,” I said aloud, more to myself. “Bad for the grimoire. Why? Lavinia doesn’t want it.” Would she lock it up like I had? “She could destroy it. Lavinia will destroy it. She has to. She’s going to obliterate it, all that work.” I felt a surge of hope. “That’s why she’s avoiding it. She knows she has to destroy it. It’s too dangerous. The glaistyn hasn’t bewitched her into doing wrong, it’s bewitched her into doing the Capital-R Right thing. Wow,” I marveled, “what a funny little bugger. That really is a tricky trick. Making a black witch destroy a century’s worth of bad magic.” I slid a look at Blanche. “And you’d all cast her out for it, wouldn’t you? Even if she’s doing it under the influence of the glaistyn, you’d never forgive her. She’ll be run out of your Happy Hearth Humpers society.”
Blanche’s eyebrows knit. “Happy Hearth Humpers? Really?”
It sounded as though the wisest course of action might be to stand aside and let Lavinia have the grimoire, though I’d already decided that Felix was likely the best home for it. Blanche focused on the orb to connect to Lavinia’s thoughts again while I mulled over Plan A: Open the door, open the herb cabinet, and then take myself out of the equation. I needed a Plan B in case the Blue Sense or Blanche hinted that Lavinia might use the grimoire to… what could she do? I don’t know, blow up the planet? That was silly. I’d used that book, I’d seen some of it; surely there was nothing too scary in there.
“Plan A: I let her have the grimoire,” I said as I heard Wes dragging the spork cannon into the pantry. “Plan B… I don’t let her have the grimoire.”
“I like it!” Wes announced from the shadows.
Uh oh, that can’t be a good sign. “Hey, I—“
“Fuck,” Blanche spat. “Lavinia is being blocked. Outside.”
We all scrambled up to our feet and pushed and shoved in front of the front door to peer in turns out the little peephole. Blanche was right. At the end of the driveway, planted in a row like gunslingers at high noon, Gus, Felix, Eunice, and Wymon stood between Lavinia’s rental car and the cabin.
“Plan C,” I said, “They don’t let Lavinia have the grimoire.”
“Plan D,” Blanche suggested, “Give it to me. Right now. Doesn’t that fix all the problems we’ve been having?”
I shot her a startled look. “Blanche, it may be super dangerous. Are you willing to risk that?”
But of course she was, and the Blue Sense told me as much; of all the black witches, she was the one who wanted it most. “It’s the safest solution, trust me!”
Wes darted forward with a hiss. I had a split second to decide whether to jump away or in front of Blanche. I plunged to the floor and let my brother grab Blanche by the throat with both hands; he threw her up against the coat rack, raining hats and scarves down on the floor. Blanche dropped her orb and both her hands scrambled to find purchase on Wes to push and scratch.
“She’s going to kill you to claim it,” Wes rasped at me, ignoring the nails digging into scarred side of his face.
My heart hammered hard. “You saw that in her mind?” He didn’t need to answer that and hadn’t the
energy to do so; Wes was trying very hard to control himself, control his sudden burst of protective rage, but his fangs had slid out and his mouth had filled with saliva. His arms shook not with the effort to hold her up, but from fighting the temptation to snap her neck and drain her veins before they cooled. “Wes, talk to me.”
“When Ruby died, the book came to you,” he said, focusing on Blanche’s mind and not the fluttering pulse under his immortal hand. “You’ve tampered with it, and it’s already started to bond with you, Marnie. The process has begun. That ‘before Samhain’ stuff is bullcrap. It’s too late for them to save you from it and they never intended to.”
“And here I thought I could take a bunch of black witches at their word,” I drawled. Of course they weren’t trying to help me, but I hadn’t thought that in order to help themselves they’d have to completely destroy me. I felt the initial stirring of my own anger, wrapped and woven around my brother’s, heavy in the small space of the hallway.
“They think they have to kill you to claim it.”
“But is that true?”
“I don’t know, Marnie,” Wes said. “I only know what Blanche knows. Lavinia told them it was so. They’ve done all this petitioning nonsense to stall for time until Harry and I were at rest and unable to protect you.”
“Well, they didn’t count on my revenant brother having undead insomnia from eating too many gummy bears, did they? Ha! Guess we fooled them.”
Blanche choked and wrestled, scratching at Wes’s strong hands to try and pry them off her throat. It would do her no good; Wes had an immortal’s grip and a brother’s protective rage; he was not letting her go.
I took out my gun and flicked the safety off. I half-opened the front door, careful not the let the sun hit my brother. “Throw her out.”
Wes hauled her away from the wall and heaved her one-handed out onto the porch. Blanche grunted with the impact and rolled down the steps, red hair flying.
I aimed my gun at her and asked quietly, “How did you hide your intentions from me? From the revenants?” She didn’t have to answer. “Gus’s protection spell in the woods, that’s when you were plotting your assault, right? His spell shielded you from my Talents. That’s why you were all so difficult to read, why my empathic powers were spotty. And you all knew that the plan meant my death?” I swallowed a dry lump in my throat. “Felix knew?” That one hurt the most. But we bonded over porn. He wanted to collaborate with Mona Bangs.