“No, I couldn’t have. You were already dead by the first time I visited this house. And you aren’t real.” I stepped resolutely past him, and kept walking without looking back.
“You pitied her,” Gordon said from behind me. I ignored him. “You wanted her to feed.”
I heard his footsteps, following me, and the grass rustling as he moved through it. A chill went through me as I imagined his fingers scratching across the back of my neck.
He would catch me, any second now.
He’s not real. He can’t hurt you.
“You wanted her to feed. You wanted me to die.”
“I didn’t,” I whispered. “Of course I didn’t.”
As if his words had summoned her, Lily Wick’s laughter rang in my head, musical, mocking, and clear. She wasn’t weak, as she had been in life. Not anymore.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” she trilled.
Hands came up from the tall grass, reaching for me. Whispers drifted around me.
She ate us.
“But you will be,” the invisible Lily warned. “You will be as hungry as I was. And as cold. You will be dead.”
We’re dead already.
We’re all doomed.
It wasn’t the children whispering anymore. Others were walking toward me now, down from the house. Arabella. Lance and Agatha. Wendy and Caleb.
They were all dead. Wasted and pale and milky-eyed, like Gordon.
Phineas staggered toward me, bleeding copiously from his left shoulder. The blood spurted and flew, covering him. Covering me, too, as he came ever closer.
See? It’s not real. It’s like a zombie movie. A bad one. He would never bleed that much from his shoulder.
Don’t believe any of it.
“Your fault,” my cousin rasped, before he collapsed, twitching, on the ground.
I called out to the rest of them wordlessly, whether pleading for help or trying to make them go away, I wasn’t sure. My foot caught something, and I stumbled and fell into the tall grass.
Ticks will bite you here.
Children will bite you here.
No.
I couldn’t see Phineas anymore, but I could still hear the others, the grass distorting the sounds of their footsteps into the slithering of many snakes. I rolled onto my side with a groan of pain. I couldn’t get up. My hips were broken. My whole lower body was bloody, as if something had bitten me repeatedly.
Not real.
I started to crawl.
But why did you fall? What did you trip over?
I didn’t want to know. But I looked back anyway.
An aqua eye stared from between the blades of grass. Below it I caught a flash of gray skin, and then an expanse of blue lips and white teeth. A stiff, lifeless face frozen in a smile that had once been delightfully charming.
Not real. Just the curse.
Where Cooper’s neck should have met his shoulders, it met nothing at all instead.
not real not real not real
But there was no conquering the hallucination, not anymore. I could do nothing but stare at Cooper’s head, as my beloved dead approached faster and faster, running now. Coming for me, perhaps to take my head as well.
The witch calls. Answer, or die.
I came to with those words going round and round in my mind, and my head in a kind of agony I’d seldom known.
I was reluctant to open my eyes, partly for fear of vomiting if I let in any light, partly for fear that this was all a trick, and I would find myself still at Cayuga Lake, being devoured by the zombified remains of everyone dear to me.
Cautiously, I tested my other senses. I heard breathing—whether mine or someone else’s, I wasn’t sure. There was a vague sense of motion. And a familiar, wonderful, comforting smell.
I took a few deep breaths, which confirmed that I was not imagining that scent of butter and pepper. Cooper wasn’t even a chef anymore, apart from the occasional guest appearance in one of the hotel’s restaurants, but he still smelled the same.
Still not quite ready to open my eyes, I moved one of my hands instead. It was pressed against something hard. Something chest-like.
“You’re okay,” someone murmured. Cooper murmured. My unsteady heartbeat, so often made more erratic by his presence, became less so now.
“I’ve got you,” he went on. “You’ll be fine now.”
Yes. It’ll be okay now. This is real.
Isn’t it?
Is it?
“But you’re dead,” I said. “I saw you.”
“Shhh, you had an attack, that’s all. But it’s okay now. You’re going to be fine.”
I did open my eyes then, and found him carrying me across the hotel lawn. “How did you find me?”
His chuckle rumbled against my cheek. “Were you supposed to be hiding?”
“No, I don’t think so. But how are you carrying me?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question.”
“You’re just a head. How can you carry me with no arms?”
He looked down into my face, clearly concerned by where this was going. I guessed he was used to me recovering from curse attacks a bit more quickly.
“Did you fall?” he asked, his voice a bit sharper. “Hit your head, maybe?”
“No, I saw your head,” I explained. “In the grass. Someone cut it off. It might have been Alex. I don’t think Lily could cut someone’s head off. But maybe it was one of the zombies.”
Cooper stopped and, his hands being full of me, bent awkwardly to rest his cheek against my forehead. He swore and squeezed me in tighter.
“You’ve got a fever. A high one, I’m guessing.” He started walking again, faster this time. “It’s okay. We’ll take care of you. It’ll be okay now.”
Even as hazy as I was, it occurred to me that that was the third time he’d said some variation on it’ll be okay now. The realization jarred me a bit from my stupor.
“Why did you come out to find me?” I asked. “Did something happen?”
He smiled down at me. “I’ll tell you all about it once we get you inside.”
I rested my head against his shoulder, saying a silent prayer of thanks. If he really had found a clue that might lead us to Serena, it wasn’t a moment too soon.
Arabella was in the lobby when we walked in. She seemed to be trying to organize some sort of search party with Lance. How long had I been gone? I turned my head against Cooper’s chest, drinking in his smell again, to look back out the front doors. Judging by the bit of sky I could see, it was late afternoon. I’d somehow lost hours to this attack.
“Why did you let her go out there?” Cooper snapped at both Arabella and Lance, at the front desk in general, maybe the whole lobby. This was always the way of it, now. Though he was as gentle and kind as could be with me, he was in the foulest temper imaginable with everyone else, and quick to blame anyone and everyone for any increase in my suffering. Standing by helpless while a loved one decayed, as badly as I was decaying, was not the sort of thing that showed Cooper Blackwood at his best.
Lance bristled and looked like he might say something in his own defense—something about having a grownup job that wasn’t babysitting, maybe—but Arabella had long since learned to ignore her cousin’s rants, and simply turned to follow us up the main staircase.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, waving goodbye to Lance over Cooper’s shoulder. “Lost the time, I guess.”
“Don’t think you won’t be getting a lecture from me about it when you’re feeling better,” said Arabella. “You should stop going out there every day.”
“I won’t do that. My magic is all I have left.”
“You have us,” Arabella said.
“Much good it does her, when you just let her run around the woods hallucinating alone,” said Cooper.
Arabella either didn’t hear him, or pretended not to. She walked in silence until we reached my door, then squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll leave you to rest.”
But Cooper s
hook his head as he put me down to swipe the key through. “Might as well come in. She won’t rest for real until she hears what I’ve got, and you need to hear it, too.”
“So what is it?” I asked.
“Get inside, get into some pajamas, and get into bed,” Cooper ordered. “You still have a fever. Once you’re squared away, I’ll tell you everything.”
It wasn’t until I’d followed all those instructions, and Cooper had brought me some ibuprofen, a small pot of tea, and a grilled cheese on a tray, that he finally sat at the foot of the bed and said, “I think I’ve finally found them.”
“How?”
He pulled a folded piece of newsprint from his pocket and leaned over to hand it to me. “This.”
It was a clipping of classified ads—specifically, people looking for roommates—although I couldn’t tell what paper, or what city, it came from. I knew enough by then about how the Blackwoods operated to know there was some sort of code embedded in one of the listings. Still tired and a little dizzy, I amused myself for a few seconds trying to guess which one.
Arabella sat beside me to read over my shoulder, then laughed and pointed. “Is that Uncle Bart?”
“It is,” said Cooper, grinning at her. “See, I’ve been scouring the usual Blackwood haunts online, right? Except I kind of forgot about the really old timers.” He looked back at me. “Uncle Bart’s a couple of generations above us.”
“So when you say old timers, you mean the ones who were around before the internet,” I said.
“Right. So I thought I should check out whether any of them are still in action.”
“I haven’t heard from Uncle Bart in ages,” Arabella said. “I had no idea he was still doing stuff with old-school newspapers.”
“In that message, they’re definitely referring to Cillian Wick,” Cooper said. “But it translates to a name I’ve never heard before, Corbin Farthingale.”
“How do you get Corbin Farthingale from a single white male looking for someone to share his restored brownstone?” I asked.
“It’s a code, that’s the point,” said Cooper. “I can show you.”
“Never mind, I’d never be able to follow it with this headache.” Blackwoods and their secret decoder rings. The fact was, I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to follow it without the headache, either, but there was no need to admit that.
“The point is, I guessed it might be one of his old aliases, one only the old guys know because it isn’t in use anymore. And guess what?” This time Cooper pulled out his phone, swiped his thumb across it a few times, then passed that to me, too.
It was an aerial photo of what looked like a college campus, or maybe an office park, surrounded by a wall. “Is there meant to be a house in here somewhere?”
Then I saw it: a hedge maze.
And on the other side of the property, fenced-in bits of land, like corrals or pastures, and a large barn. It might have qualified as a zoo.
“Balls.” I stared at the phone, then at Cooper. “This is the place. This is really it.”
“Nice work, Coop,” said Arabella. “I assume the owner is one Corbin Farthingale?”
“Yep,” Cooper said. “It’s them. It has to be this time. That’s everything Max told us was there, including the pool. You can see that on the lower right.”
“Where is it?” I asked. “The place, I mean, not the pool.”
“Middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania,” said Cooper. “I think the locals actually think it’s a retirement community.”
I looked from him to Arabella and back again, pulling as stern a face as I could manage. “We aren’t going to fight about whether I can come, right?”
We weren’t. They’d been there on Halloween, and they’d heard the hag’s words. They knew just as well as I did that the curse demanded I go to Serena. We had no idea how literally we needed to take that, and we couldn’t afford to take any chances.
Arabella would have to be the one to stay behind this time, to watch over the two sapwood seeds in the Mount Phearson’s vault. She was a skilled fighter—losing half her sight hadn’t changed that—but this mission would depend more on finesse than firepower. We couldn’t take down the Wicks by force, certainly not with me in the state I was in, and the clock ticking as it was. We had to get in and get Serena out as quickly and as quietly as possible, before they knew what hit them. Once I was better, then we could work on what came next.
I expected Arabella to argue with this plan. She wasn’t much of one for sitting around, and it was, after all, her stepmother we were going to save. The two weren’t close, but they were the only immediate family left to one another, now that Dalton was dead.
But to my surprise, she agreed to stay without a fuss. “Serena would just lecture me about my father’s death, if I was there. And then tell me I’ve gained too much weight and my hair’s the wrong length. Probably all before we even got her untied.”
I chuckled, but Arabella shook her head. “You only think I’m joking. Wait until you meet her.”
“Phineas is going ahead of us, since he’s such an expert at that whole teleportation thing,” Cooper said.
“You already arranged this with him?” I asked.
“Called him before I even came out to find you. We need information, and he can get it the quickest. Entrances, security, routines. He’s probably already there.”
I didn’t like asking for help, as a general rule—this war against the Wicks was too dangerous—but I was glad to have my cousin on our side this time. He’d cultivated the phantasm’s natural ability to travel between planes until he could practically blink around a place unfettered, or so I’d heard. That seemed like a handy skill to have on a rescue mission.
“He’ll help us get in,” Cooper went on. “But you and I will be the ones to get Serena. You should probably be the only one who touches her, in fact, just to make sure we don’t leave any loopholes.”
“We’re flying up there,” I said, and once again waited for an argument. Cooper never flew if he could help it. But apparently that afternoon’s scare had convinced him to prioritize speed this time. He nodded as he stood and picked up my tray, leaving the mug of tea on my bedside table.
“As you wish.” He dropped a kiss on my forehead. “But for now, do me a favor and get some sleep. We can’t go anywhere until that fever breaks.”
The fever only lasted another day, and as I’d come to expect with curse attacks, once it passed I felt better than I had before it came. If things continued to follow pattern, I would get a short reprieve—a week at most—before I started declining again. This was our window; now was the time to rescue Serena, and break this curse once and for all.
Unfortunately, Margery Smith and the Bristol Garden Club had other ideas. On the morning we were making ready to leave, Lance came knocking on my door in a red fury.
“They’re trying to delay the opening of the spa,” he said.
“What now?” I asked, although I was markedly less concerned than he was. Being reported for some (inevitably made-up) violation, or having one of our crucial contractors suddenly fall ill, were no longer newsworthy events around the Mount Phearson. Lance’s ambitious renovations—more of a reinvention, really—had started even before I’d inherited the place, and the Garden Club had fought him tooth and nail for pretty much every minute of it.
But their efforts always came to nothing, in the end. The additions to the hotel proper had been finished in November with the Thanksgiving opening of Haven, the Mount Phearson’s third and fanciest restaurant. The spa was all but done, and due to open its doors in March. Only the new stable remained, and that was moving along as close to on-schedule as I ever expected of construction.
And it had all been a grand success. Haven was getting glowing reviews, owing to an extremely talented chef by the name of Satchel Brooks, whose praises were being sung as far as Asheville. I wasn’t sure Cooper was entirely delighted with this outcome—the head chef job had originally been offered to hi
m—but it was a great relief to many of the rest of us, both inside the hotel and out. We knew Bristol couldn’t count on the devil’s own luck forever, now that the devil was gone. But thanks largely to Lance’s efforts to strengthen its position as a getaway destination, the town was doing as well as it ever had in its long history of enchanted prosperity.
Which you would think would make everyone, even the Garden Club, happy. But Marjory Smith resented an outsider coming in and taking control of Bristol’s most important landmark. And given my long absence—and only grudging acceptance before that—she didn’t consider me much more of an insider than Lance. As long as he and I were in positions of power, she would never be satisfied.
She had been trying to break that power even before I’d cemented it with the sanctuary spell, before she’d joined forces with Cillian Wick. Now, it was about more than just small-town politics. It was nothing short of a life-and-death struggle. Last autumn, Marjory had told me outright that she intended to see me to my grave.
But she hadn’t killed me yet, nor found a way to break my spell. And whatever petty mischief she was trying to work on the spa would be dealt with, just like all the rest.
“They’re openly using magic this time,” Lance said. “Just like the day you did your sanctuary ritual, when they did that… whatever that was… in the parking lot.”
“They’re standing outside the spa and chanting?”
“I’m afraid so. I assume they’re attempting to curse the place, or something?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I don’t suppose it would do any good to call the cops?”
“None. Asher is there. In uniform.”
“Then have our security team direct them to leave. And they might mention to Asher that we’ll be contacting his superiors. Again.”
Lance rubbed the back of his neck, looking strained. “That much I worked out on my own. I’ve already got two guards out there. I know we can get them to leave. The question is, what will they be leaving behind? I don’t know how to tell if whatever they’re doing is finished, or if it worked, or how long it will last. You know magic isn’t my area of expertise.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll cleanse the place to make sure nobody gets hurt or sick or anything. I’ll call Wendy and Granny. I’m sure they’ll come as soon as they can. If you want to halt work in the meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, you can afford to lose a day or two and still open on time. I’ll authorize weekend overtime, or something.”
Witch Bound (Devilborn Book 3) Page 3