Witch Bound
by Jen Rasmussen
Copyright © 2016 Jen Rasmussen
All rights reserved
Cover art by Christine Rasmussen
Cover typography by WickedGoodBookCovers.com
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
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Dear Reader
“Just anything at all that you can sense, Max. And remember, any time you feel overwhelmed, all you have to do is say the word. We don’t have to stay a minute longer than you want to.”
Max Underwood nodded at my words, but I wasn’t entirely sure they sank in. He was staring up at the dark windows of Number Twelve Fenwick Street, his mouth agape.
I followed his gaze, although I couldn’t stand to look for long. It seemed to me that Number Twelve glared back through its empty glass eyes. Defiant. Resentful. My own eyes slid away again.
No doubt we made a strange crew, to any residents of Fenwick Street who happened to look out their windows. Three women and one man, the latter dressed in a bright blue coat and red winter hat topped with an overlarge pompom, standing at the curb, watching the house like we all expected it to attack us at any moment.
Which, speaking for myself, was not a possibility I was ruling out.
I touched Max’s elbow, and he gave me a wan smile. “I bet it’ll be warmer inside,” he said.
“I’m sure it will be,” I agreed. I was shivering myself. My blood had thinned since my last New England December, it seemed. And I was weak. So weak.
“Well, I think we’ve stood around wishing we were someplace else long enough, don’t you?” Arabella climbed the porch steps and unlocked the door.
Max and Lydia went next. I was the last into the house, and visibly the most reluctant, despite the fact that Arabella’s father had died in the front parlor, the same room where she herself had lost an ear and an eye. Yet she managed to walk in with confidence and purpose, while I tottered behind, still shaking.
I could barely stomach being there. Or bringing Max there. He wasn’t what you might call a stable person even at the best of times, and I’d failed him before. I hated the idea of causing him any more suffering, especially on my account. But although I’d avoided it as long as I could, eventually even I’d been forced to admit that we were too desperate to be choosy about our tactics.
Even so. I shouldn’t have come back here.
I felt it at once, the instant the front door closed behind us: Number Twelve’s outrage. I sensed it asking, as surely as if the house had spoken aloud, how I dared to darken its door, without bringing back that which I’d promised.
I’m trying. I’m trying my best, I swear.
But you have to help us. Please.
Number Twelve was not appeased.
“There are bad things here,” Max said.
I nodded at this succinct description. “The house feels cheated. I promised it I would bring Serena home.”
“So tell it we’re trying,” Lydia whispered. I’d always known her to be exceptionally hardy in the face of the supernatural, but she looked nervous as she peered around the dim hallway, taking in the broken light fixture, the cracked ceiling, and, no doubt, the heavy sense of impending doom.
“I did,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s good enough.”
“We’re working on it.” Arabella spoke both loudly and slowly, as if to an elderly person who wasn’t quite with it. “But you didn’t give us anything to go on. Max here wants to connect with you. To see if he can find her.”
For a second the house seemed to shudder, and I almost ducked, afraid of flying glass, or worse.
“Stay away from the windows,” I said. “And stay together.”
But Max ignored me. He walked straight up to the wall and pressed his palm against the faded wallpaper. “It’s okay. You’re just lonely. I used to be lonely. It made me mad sometimes, too. But I’m not lonely or mad anymore. We’re going to try to fix it for you, so you won’t have to be, either.”
I reached out with my mind. The anger was still palpable, but seemed contained, as though the house was willing to at least watch us for a while, before passing final judgment. Hopefully, that wasn’t just wishful thinking on my part.
“Okay,” I said. “Still stay away from the windows, though. And be… respectful. Max, where do you want to go?”
“Martha says the kitchen is the heart of any house,” Max said. “Let’s try there.”
As we made our way down the hallway, I avoided looking into the parlor where Dalton Blackwood, Talon Wick, and several others had lost their lives on Halloween. But from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement, over by the newly repaired windows.
I won’t look. I won’t look.
We came into the dining room, and I distinctly heard a growl.
Is that the house, or the curse?
It was hard to tell, these days. And now that we’d left Bristol, I had soulsickness to contend with on top of it. The headache and the moodiness were not doing my already unsteady mind any good.
But no, surely that movement under the table wasn’t a hallucination. My breathing was steady, as was my pulse. I felt as composed as I could be expected to, under the circumstances. I wasn’t having an attack.
Please don’t let me be having an attack.
Whatever it was moved again. Something far too big to be a mouse, or even a cat.
“Did you see that?” I crouched down to look.
There was no animal, no monster under the table. But there was a puddle of blood on the threadbare carpet. It was pulsing, like the surface of a pot about to boil. Like something was trying to rise from underneath.
“Do you see that?”
Lydia and Arabella both stopped and cast wary glances, not under the table, but at me. I looked from them back to the rug.
No blood. Only an old coffee stain.
Arabella helped me up, then grabbed my hand and pushed up the sleeve of my coat to expose the bruise on my inner arm. It had changed since Halloween. For one thing, it extended all the way up to my elbow now. And I had to wear long sleeves all the time to hide it—not a problem, since I always seemed to be cold—because even as bruises went, it was unsightly. Its mottled acid green and bile yellow coloring was unnaturally bright, like cartoon poison.
“Are you about to have an attack?” Arabella was bent so closely over my wrist, examining it with her one true eye (the other being glass now), that she seemed to be speaking directly to the bruise. “Because now is not the—”
“I’m fine,” I said, pulling my arm back.
It’s not an attack. Please don’t be an attack.
“I’m sure it’s just being in this house.” I closed my eyes and willed that to be true. Arabella was right: now was not the time for my curse to rear its ugly, disastrous head. But it was doing so more and more often these days.
The witch calls you. Answer, or die.
I hadn’t answered. And now I was dying.
Just fight it off, I ordered myself. As if it was a simple matter of will. And maybe it was; a curse was only magic, after all. Maybe if I kept trying hard en
ough, I could master this one.
Fight it off a little longer. Just make it through this. You can have all the attacks you want back home.
Max, oblivious to my distress, was conducting his own examination of every corner of the dining room, and looked frequently up at the ceiling. “There are no webs,” he said finally. “It would be easier if there were spiders. Why aren’t there any?”
“Maybe it’s too cold for them,” Lydia suggested.
“Or maybe the house doesn’t like them,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.
Maybe the house ate them all.
Had there been spider webs, last fall? I thought I remembered some, but that might just have been part of my general impression of the place. It was certainly run down and not very clean.
But maybe there were spiders here.
Until I woke up the house.
The house is hungry.
I swallowed and tried to look calm.
I should never have come back here.
But what choice did I have? Arabella had spoken the truth, when she said we had nothing to go on. Serena’s curse demanded that we rescue her from the Wicks, but she’d given us no clues as to where they were keeping her, and we had few resources with which to discover the location of their lair.
The old crone who’d cursed me on Halloween hadn’t told us anything. Her babble merely became more and more confused, until finally she seemed to wake up, as if from a trance. At that point she called us hippies, accused us of drugging her apples, and demanded that we leave her alone before she called the cops.
As for the Blackwoods, they weren’t in the habit of seeking out their mortal enemies; they were the prey, not the hunters. But even if they did have some intelligence on the Wick clan’s location, they wouldn’t be likely to share it. We were outlaws, operating in total isolation.
Arabella’s late father—Serena’s late husband—had been the head of Blackwood clan intelligence. Arabella had searched through his files, both physical and electronic, decoding what she could. But so far, nothing she’d found had led us to her stepmother.
Frustrated by the lack of information from his erstwhile allies, Cooper had turned to his enemies instead. By a combination of tricks of his own and a sizable outlay of cash to a couple of his connections, he’d managed to hack into Marjory Smith’s email, as well as her nephew Asher’s. But however the Bristol Garden Club was communicating with the Wicks, it wasn’t via email. To my great surprise, Marjory’s coven actually did talk a great deal about gardening, with the occasional, more expected diatribe against me thrown into the mix.
Lydia had recruited some of her tech-savvy family members to help Cooper with his attempts to hack his way to the location of the Wick stronghold. In the meanwhile, her husband (and my cousin) Phineas, with his talent for magical healing, had been trying tirelessly but fruitlessly to alleviate the effects of the curse.
None of it had gotten us anywhere. And every day, I got weaker and sicker, my hold on reality more tenuous. Answer or die was starting to look like more than just something the hag had said for dramatic effect.
Which brought us to this. Max Underwood had a flash of Sight, now and again, more so than anyone else we knew. He’d once helped Lydia find someone who’d gone missing, and it turned out that they were being held in a completely different world. So Lydia and Phineas had suggested we bring Max up here, and to my surprise, he agreed without hesitation. We hoped that if he could connect with Serena’s house, maybe he could connect with Serena herself, and tell us a little something—anything, really—about where she was.
My lapse in the dining room finished (or so I hoped), we walked through to the kitchen. It was, at least, a bit brighter than the rest of the house. I went to the sink and drank from the faucet, then splashed some water on my face.
“You going to be okay?” Arabella asked me.
I made a gesture halfway between a nod and a shrug that mostly came off as twitching, and probably did little to reassure her. “Let’s just let Max do his thing.”
Max sat down at the breakfast table, closed his eyes, and sighed. “I wish there were spiders.”
“I know,” Lydia said, taking the seat across from him. “But just see if you feel anything at all.”
“It’s easy to feel things here,” said Max.
“You’ve got that right,” I muttered, and Arabella nodded, drawing the coat she was still wearing more tightly around her.
“You said the house was lonely, right?” Lydia asked.
“Right,” said Max.
“Well, who do you think it’s lonely for? Who does it miss?”
“Its mistress.”
“And where is she?” Lydia prompted.
Max opened his eyes and frowned. “The house doesn’t know.”
“I know it doesn’t,” Lydia said. “But her energy is here. Use that connection to see if you can see anything about her.”
Max closed his eyes again. “The people who lived here weren’t very happy. I don’t know why the house wants them back.”
Arabella took my elbow and led me away from the table, back toward the dining room. “Look, this will be the last thing you want to hear,” she whispered. “But while he’s trying, you should do the same.”
I shook my head. “I’m not a seer.”
“I know, but you can communicate with the house. And Serena sure as hell got to you through this place the last time you opened that connection.”
She was right about that. Given that the old hag on Halloween had seemed almost possessed, our best guess was that my wakening the house had somehow given Serena the power to act through it. Or near it. Or something. We hadn’t worked out all the details, but surely it wasn’t a coincidence that hours after I’d poured power into her home, Serena had managed to curse me. And there was no doubt it was her curse. The hag had specifically said that it was the witch, not the house, who bound me.
“But I don’t think that’s a two-way channel,” I said. “It’s not my house. I don’t think I can use it the same way Serena did.”
Even the phrase use it made me tense. Number Twelve wouldn’t like that. I was not its mistress, and it did not serve me.
And unlike Max, I was especially unwelcome here.
“You might as well try, while we’re here,” Arabella said. “Beats standing here just staring at Max, doesn’t it?”
Frankly, I wasn’t sure it did. But I nodded and said, “Can you show me her room? Maybe touching something of hers would help.”
Arabella led me upstairs to the master bedroom. I’d never been in that part of the house, but it seemed to have been updated more recently than the lower floor. The bedroom was painted rather than wallpapered, in a cool gray, and had plenty of natural light. It almost made Number Twelve less creepy.
Except that I still felt the place, resenting me.
I’m trying, I told it.
I crossed to the old-fashioned dresser and opened the top drawer. A few bottles, some coins, old receipts. A hairbrush. That would do. I picked it up and closed my eyes, then reached out for the house.
I’m trying. But I need help.
I lent you my energy on Halloween. Now lend me a bit of yours.
Help me sense your mistress.
I thought about asking Arabella for a picture, but decided I’d let Number Twelve, rather than my own perceptions, be my guide. I clutched the brush and opened my mind, concentrating on the feeling of the place.
What was it like, when she was here?
Show me.
The mood of the house shifted, just a little. It seemed calmer, more at peace.
Serene, maybe? Had Serena been so aptly named?
No, it wasn’t that kind of calm. It wasn’t tranquility, or sleepiness. More the calm that comes from a great deal of confidence. Serena wasn’t afraid of anything. There was no tension about her.
Not when she lived there, anyway. Heaven only knew what months of captivity with the Wicks had done to her. I’d hear
d she was missing body parts.
But it wouldn’t do to dwell on that. I gripped the brush harder still, and tried again, focusing on the gossamer-thin sense of Serena I was getting, trying to latch onto it with my will.
Show me.
The anger returned, but I didn’t think it was the house this time. Serena, wherever she was, was not afraid. But she was mad.
Maybe in both senses of the word.
Show me.
What are you angry about? Tell me.
I’m here, Serena.
I want to listen. I want to see. I want to find you.
Show me.
It took several more minutes of intense concentration (and begging), but finally, I made a fleeting connection. And Serena did show me. Only a brief glimpse, but it was something.
It was darkness. And pain.
It was a hot knife, in a cold room.
A blade sinking into flesh. A spurt of blood. Revulsion. Agony.
I dropped the brush and turned to Arabella. She was staring at me in bald fear.
“Sorry. Did I scream or something?”
She shook her head, and pointed at my face. I felt moisture there, running down my cheeks. Sweat? Tears?
I looked in the mirror above the dresser. It wasn’t sweat, and it wasn’t tears.
It was blood, running freely from my eyes.
It took several minutes to stop the bleeding and get my face cleaned up.
“Do not mention this downstairs,” I said to Arabella. “And whatever you do, do not tell Cooper.”
She snorted. “Credit me with better self-preservation skills than that.”
I was sitting on the counter in the master bathroom, while Arabella stood in front of me, pressing a washcloth to the corner of my right eye, which was still seeping a bit. I studied her face as she concentrated on mine. She was still beautiful, despite the scars (to put it mildly) she’d picked up along the way. But the strain of the past weeks was showing in the shadows under her eyes, the faint lines around her mouth that shouldn’t have appeared for years yet. The loss of her father had hit her hard, and then the clan right afterward. Throwing her lot in with us was as good as declaring open rebellion against them. And now she had to deal with the stresses of babysitting me.
Witch Bound (Devilborn Book 3) Page 1