by Mindy Klasky
But thirteen years? And a double name change, along with a move to a different state? Abigail Somerset was completely invisible to Hecate’s Court.
David fought a frisson of excitement as he said, “I work for Hecate’s Court. It’s a secret organization dedicated to protecting witches. Jane recently came to our attention because of…skills she demonstrated.”
“Our Jeanette!” exclaimed Clara, pressing a hand to her heart. “I knew it! Didn’t I tell you, Mother? My horoscope said it was time to come back to DC. ‘A loved one has need of your aid.’”
Mrs. Smythe’s frown expressed everything she believed about horoscopes. “Mr. Montrose,” she said. “What exactly do you want from us?”
“I want what’s best for Jane,” he said quickly. “Often, we find that witches mirror their mothers’ power. With three generations of Smythe women working together, harnessing the raw power we’ve already seen from Jane…”
Mrs. Smythe shook her head. “I don’t think that will be happening right now,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“This is not the time to push my granddaughter.”
“With all due respect, Mrs. Smythe, this is exactly the time to encourage Jane to explore her strength. She’s already awakened her familiar, and she’s worked her first spells. If she collaborates with the two of you to grow and expand her reservoir of power—”
“No.”
“Maybe I haven’t made myself clear—”
“You’ve made yourself perfectly clear, Mr. Montrose. But you’re speaking about the potential of a woman you’ve barely met. I’m speaking about the emotional well-being of a granddaughter I know and very much love. This is not the time to turn her world upside down.” Mrs. Smythe took a prim sip of her decaf, settling her cup back on its saucer with a delicate clink of china on china. The sound seemed to help her reach a conclusion. “All right, Mr. Montrose. I wasn’t going to say this. It’s nobody’s business but Jane’s. But I honestly believe you want to help her.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Smythe hesitated, looking at her daughter while her lips thinned with some unexplained tension. But by the time she turned back to him, the old woman was a mountain of resolve.
“Jane ended a long-term relationship nine months ago,” Mrs. Smythe said. “Her employer is financially insolvent, which places her job in jeopardy. And just this week, she learned that her mother—Clara—is alive and well and interested in being part of her life after more than twenty years. In fact, she’s going to meet her mother this morning.”
Now David understood Mrs. Smythe’s furious devotion to Jane. But he couldn’t give up. Not with Samhain only five weeks away and his career hanging in the balance. “I can’t walk away from Jane’s potential, Mrs. Smythe.”
The old woman’s lips twisted in a resigned grin. “I’m not asking you to. I suspect Jane won’t let you, either. But Clara and I can’t get involved. We can’t be part of her training in any way.” She sipped at the sludge in her coffee cup and eyed the platter of sweets as if the secrets to the universe were written in pastry. “Why don’t we try this? The three of us will keep this little talk a secret. David, dear, you go on and teach Jane whatever you think she’s ready to learn. But Clara and I? We’ll just pretend this little meeting never happened.”
It felt wrong. She was asking him to lie to his witch.
No. She was asking him to lie for his witch. She’d known her granddaughter since Jane was an infant. She knew what was best.
“All right,” he said at last.
“Excellent!” Mrs. Smythe crowed. And she settled back in her chair and finished every last bite on her plate.
19
David edged past the stack of bankers boxes in the hallway, then brushed at the dust on his sleeve. He’d come straight from Sarah Smythe’s apartment, intent on using his Saturday to investigate the story she’d told him.
He wasn’t surprised that a quick computer search on the mundane Internet had yielded no information about Abigail Carroll, née Somerset. He’d hoped for a little more from the court’s internal filing system—if not a reference to the witch in conjunction with Salem, then some mention of her name with regard to artifacts she’d once owned, properly recorded on Request for Protection forms if nothing else.
His senses had jangled as he ran a dozen quick searches. Relics that he’d logged personally set off a symphony of sounds, an explosion of tastes at the back of his throat. He saw a few flashes of light, and one long-orphaned rowan wand ignited the sting of nettles across the backs of his hands.
But none of those items connected with Salem, Massachusetts was actually tagged with Abigail’s name—not the relics he’d cataloged, nor ones that had been docketed by any other warder.
Knowing his task was hopeless, he’d checked birth records for the Boston Coven. They’d exercised control over Salem for decades before the seventeenth-century disaster. He called up membership records for fifty years after the mad events brought on by a handful of mundane girls and the intolerance of a church threatened by the strength of perfectly ordinary women.
Nothing. Not a hint of Abigail Somerset Windmere Carroll’s life. And so he found himself walking down a dusty basement hallway, shoving aside boxes of old records and feeling the grit of countless years under the soles of his shoes.
Warders weren’t big on libraries.
Classrooms, where they were drilled on magical workings, on obligations to witches, on their ancient obligation to the elemental Guardians and Hecate—check. The Academy occupied the top eight floors of the building.
Gyms, where they mastered swordplay and martial arts and a dozen other disciplines to best protect their witches—check.The warders’ gym filled the entire third floor.
Offices, where the least-accomplished among them wasted hours inputting computer data to satisfy power-mad bosses—check. The first and second floors were filled with offices.
Individual witches might accumulate collections of books, like the Osgood trove Jane now possessed. And covens might pool their resources, sharing rare texts among themselves, as the Washington Coven did. But warders didn’t rely on book knowledge. They simply had no need to study spells and runes, herblore and crystals.
Therefore, this was the first time in his entire career that David had strayed into the library of Hecate’s Court. He’d double-checked the basement room number, just to make sure he knew where to go.
The door at the end of the hall was painted a dull green that some industrial psychologist had probably recommended fifty years earlier, claiming it would calm whoever worked there. There wasn’t a lock or any other indication that precious materials might lurk inside.
David turned the doorknob and shoved the door open, half expecting it to creak on its hinges like the cheapest of special effects in a horror movie. There wasn’t the groan he anticipated, but it took him a moment to find the light switch, farther down the wall than any contemporary designer would have recommended.
Blinking in the dim yellow light, he made out a dozen dilapidated boxes, mostly crushed on at least one side. A few wooden bookcases slouched against the walls, sway-backed shelves indicating they’d once held something heavy. A handful of books—no more than a couple dozen, all told—was scattered on the shelves. Who Wards the Warder? asked one, its title picked out in lurid red letters on a yellow background. The Care and Feeding of Warders announced another in scrolling black letters across a field of dusky blue.
A dozen metal bookcases filled the rest of the room, empty except for banged-up shelves canting at unlikely angles. A single glance confirmed that no wealth of historical records lurked in the abandoned room.
Why had David thought he could find information about a lost line of witches here, where no warder had passed for ages? It had been yet another stupid idea, one more off-base decision, probably the result of his astral senses being warped without his Torch.
He started to turn back to the hallway when an army charged in from nowhere.
>
No. That wasn’t an army stampeding across the room. It was one man snorting—loud enough and long enough that David glanced at the ceiling, fearing the fluorescent lights would shake loose from their fixtures.
As David froze, the gargling throat-clearing settled into a series of ratcheting snores, each one louder than the last. He only edged toward the noise when he was certain the asbestos tiles wouldn’t crumble above him.
A bare mattress lay in the far corner of the room, wedged between the last bookshelf and the wall. A man sprawled on his back, limbs splayed across the blue and white ticking. He wore stained grey sweatpants and an undershirt that might once have been white. His feet were shoved into torn Chuck Taylors, with no socks in sight.
It looked as if he’d have an easier time shaving his head than working a comb through his tangled hair. His beard, more salt than pepper, wasn’t in better shape. The one hand David could see looked calloused, with torn hangnails around the thumb.
A tattered box of Pop-Tarts rested above the man’s head. Three different bottles of wine bled their dregs into the mattress.
David’s first thought was to call Court Security. They could get the homeless guy out of the building with a minimum of fuss.
Before he could back away, another snore sawed through the air. Amazed by the vagrant’s lung capacity, David glanced at the guy’s chest.
That’s when he saw the Torch—fashioned out of silver and strung on a fine-linked chain that was almost lost against the filth of the T-shirt. The man was a warder.
And he was awake.
That last snore must have been more than even the drunk sleeper could ignore. Laser-sharp blue eyes peered out from a network of fine wrinkles. Before David could speak, the man rumbled, “You’re George Montrose’s boy, aren’t you?”
David was a man, his own man, had been for a decade and a half at least. But he owed respect to the older warder. Those were the strictures of Hecate’s Court, keeping the world safe for witches and mundanes alike.
“David Montrose,” he said, offering to shake after only a second’s hesitation.
The other man ignored his hand, using his elbows to haul himself into a sitting position. “Aidan,” he barked, by way of introduction. “Aidan O’Rourke.”
Of course David knew the name. Every young warder did. Aidan O’Rourke had warded Maggie Hanes, a witch in the Boston Coven. He’d watched over her for twenty-two years. But she’d killed herself in the most public way possible, raising a fiery circle near the swan boats in the Public Garden. Mundane police had investigated for months. Local television shows had interviewed traumatized kids who’d seen the whole thing. Entire websites were devoted to dissecting the supposed cover-up of some vast terrorist conspiracy.
Aidan O’Rourke had done nothing—not to save Maggie as she slipped into despair, not to hide her actions on the night she took her life, and definitely not to deflect unwelcome mundane attention during the scrutiny that followed. As a result, the warder had been burned. The Boston Coven Mother had told him his services were no longer needed. The Academy had rejected him as a potential teacher of impressionable youth. The court had refused to consider him for any job, even one as lowly as clerk. He’d been cast out from the society of warders.
O’Rourke’s name became synonymous with failure. “At least I didn’t pull an O’Rourke”—David had heard it for years. Linda had said it to him when he’d debated working for Pitt: “Take the job as a clerk, David. At least you can build on that. It’s not like you pulled an O’Rourke.”
The ruined man haunted every living warder. If asked, David would have said O’Rourke was dead by now. If not in a grave, he must be imprisoned in some mundane jail. Maybe, just possibly, he’d fled the Eastern Empire altogether.
But, surprise of surprises, Aidan O’Rourke was very much alive. And if he hadn’t hit bottom yet, his feet were scraping the jagged edge.
The grizzled warder looked suspicious as he asked the question David was thinking. “What the hell are you doing down here?”
David was surprised enough to answer honestly. “Looking for genealogy records.”
“Down here?”
He shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Those eyes pinned him again, more alert than they had any right to be. “What family?” he demanded, as if that was a perfectly normal response.
It couldn’t hurt to tell him. It might even help. O’Rourke had been tied to the Boston Coven for decades. “Carroll,” David said. “Or Somerset. Witch’s name, Abigail. She came from Salem originally.”
Silence, while whatever rusty wheels that passed for memory turned inside O’Rourke’s skull. Finally, a short shake of his head. “Never heard of her. There’s a Carroll family in Connecticut, though. Near Old Salem, if that’s not confusing enough.”
That would be the farm Clara Smythe had mentioned. But David wasn’t going to learn more about that place here. Not amid nearly-empty shelves with a wreck of a warder peering at him through dangerously bright eyes. He offered a shrug and kept his voice even. “I guess I’ll have to look somewhere else.”
“I guess so.”
Feeling awkward, David crossed to the door, but he turned back before he left. “Do you need anything? Food? Something to drink?”
O’Rourke jutted his chin toward the Pop-Tarts. “Got food.”
And David didn’t want to bring O’Rourke another bottle of wine. He hesitated a moment longer, though, his hand hovering near the light switch. “Lights on?” he asked.
O’Rourke snorted. “How’s a man supposed to sleep around with the lights on?”
David argued before he thought better of it. “You’re going back to sleep? It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
For reply, O’Rourke muttered under his breath and turned over on his mattress. His T-shirt rode above the waistband of his pants, and David stared at the knobs of his bare spine.
There wasn’t anything else to say. Not “Good night,” because the sun was still high above the horizon. Not “See you later,” because David never wanted to see the other warder—the symbol of abject failure—again. Not “Good luck,” because there was no luck involved in O’Rourke’s fate at all—he’d been a warder charged with protecting a witch, and he’d failed.
Shrugging, David turned off the light and headed upstairs, no better off for his trip to the warders’ lousy excuse for a library.
20
By the time he’d climbed back to the first floor, David was planning his visit to Jane. The steely thread to her cottage was anchored in his memory, its cool strength calling him like the placid surface of the lake back at the farm. By now, she’d met her mother. She’d had coffee or tea or one of those amazing pastries her friend baked. She’d confronted her past, the dark memories, the hard questions that had shuttered her expression over dinner at La Chaumiere.
He couldn’t just travel to Jane, though. Sure, he had his warder’s magic. It would barely take an effort to reach for Georgetown.
But he wasn’t supposed to know about Clara. He wasn’t supposed to know anything at all about Jane’s family—her mother, her grandmother, any of it. And he couldn’t trust that his desire to see Jane was based on helping her. He suspected at least part of his interest sprang from his memory of that kiss, the one he never should have allowed to happen.
Of course, meeting Clara might drive Jane to explore the Osgood collection in her basement, and then she’d need a warder. She might retreat from her complicated family life to research arcane lore in her newfound books. She might even study the crystals or runes or herbs she now owned.
He could help Jane with that. It was his obligation to help her.
He flexed his powers and reached into his memory like a tired man testing a bad tooth. He remembered the sound of the kettledrums perfectly. But the Compendium wasn’t summoning him now.
There wasn’t any flash of emerald light, either. Neko wasn’t flexing his power as a familiar.
No scent of jasmine anywhere. No hint of Jane.
He stopped dead in the middle of the atrium. He was as bad as a lovelorn schoolboy. Jane was an unwelcome complication in his life—the witch and her familiar and all the items in the Osgood collection. He should be grateful he wasn’t needed.
Had O’Rourke felt grateful after his witch was gone?
What the hell kind of question was that?
Once the words had come together in his mind, however, he couldn’t let them go. What sort of life did the old warder have? Pop-Tarts and wine and clothes worse than rags…
Dammit. He couldn’t go to Jane. And now he couldn’t go back to his own home. He needed to help the man in the basement. At least he could get the guy a decent meal.
Alas, David realized as he stepped onto the sidewalk outside the anonymous building that housed the Academy and the court, buying a meal was easier said than done. It was Saturday afternoon in the middle of a downtown block more accustomed to housing lawyers and lobbyists than a single well-intentioned warder. The sandwich place on the corner was locked as tight as the drums he still remembered at the back of his thoughts. The three banks and the cell-phone store in the middle of the block were shut down as well.
But there was a Starbucks across the street, and it was open, because no Starbucks anywhere ever seemed to close. He darted across F Street, easily avoiding the lonely red-and-grey taxicab cruising hopelessly for a fare.
The display of travel mugs solved one problem—he could buy coffee and keep it warm until O’Rourke managed to claw himself back to wakefulness. A cooler held an array of sandwiches; David picked up three without paying attention to the labels. He grabbed some overpriced organic free-range gluten-free chips as well, the type of thing that would send Connor over the moon. If, that was, Connor ever deigned to set foot inside a Starbucks. The shifter was partial to independent coffee shops with small-batch artisanal pour-overs. Of course.