by Angie Fox
She placed a china plate on the table next to me. It held an oven-warm frittata and a buttermilk biscuit. She topped it off with a cup of coffee made just the way I liked it.
As if food were the solution.
“The coffee is decaf,” Hillary said, like she was confiding a sin. “But I figure that’s probably for the best right now, and lord knows if I kept regular in the house, your father would never get to sleep at night.”
“Thanks.” If—when—everything went according to plan, I would have to start thinking about that kind of thing. Alcohol, caffeine…and wasn’t there something about pregnant women and fish? Damn. No shrimp cocktail for me.
“Lizzie?” she prodded, as if I were a disobedient child.
“I’m eating,” I told her. I grabbed a fork and took a reluctant bite of the frittata. Flavor exploded across my tongue—tart sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, feta cheese, spinach and just the right amount of salt. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my mom had magical powers, too.
Hillary quirked her lips. “I’m glad I got it right.”
On more than one count. “This does taste great. And it is making me feel better,” I admitted.
She sat down next to me, cup of coffee in hand. “I know Xavier wasn’t the best parent.”
“He almost got me killed, damned, and skewered by an angry mob,” I said, going for another bite of frittata.
Mom took an extra-long sip of coffee. “I don’t like him either,” she admitted. “But I was on the other line with your father when he called Xavier. I do think Xavier wants to help.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Parents don’t always get it right,” she said, with a shake of her head. “I’ve been thinking very hard lately about all the ways I could have been a better mother. I could definitely have been less judgmental, I see that.”
I paused with my fork in the air. “You and I are different, and that’s given us trouble. It’s natural. Normal, even. But Xavier? He’s a fallen angel with a busted moral compass and no loyalty to anybody but himself.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I think he wants to change.” I huffed and she persisted. “I’m good at reading people. You know that. My take is that Xavier is a weak person. He can be a bad person, but he wants to change.”
“You’re serious,” I said, suddenly losing my appetite. I pushed my plate away. “And what happens if he fails in this grand attempt at change and it kills me and my babies?”
Mom’s eyes glassed with tears. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just don’t know.”
I reached out and took her hand. “I apologize,” I told her. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
She squeezed. “It’s the truth. I don’t want to shy away from that.” She pursed her lips. “It’s just that your grandmother trusts him—” she gave a small shrug “—or at the very least feels like she can use him.” She gazed intently at her hand in mine. “I trust your grandmother.” Her eyes found mine. “What else is there to do? We have to have faith, Lizzie.”
“I do,” I promised. “In you and Dad. In Dimitri.” In my friends. “Just not Xavier.”
Ant Eater burst into the kitchen from the backyard with Creely in tow. “Lizzie!”
“We’re talking,” I said quickly.
She hesitated, as if she wanted to keep going. “Ah.” Her eyes fell on the trays of food.
“Take them,” Mom offered. “I was about to set up a picnic out by the pool.”
“I’ll get it going,” Ant Eater said with relish, scooping up a tray and letting Creely grab the other one.
The door banged closed behind them. “Your grandma has already gotten the witches started on a cave in the backyard.”
“A Cave of Visions?” Grandma was serious.
“That’s it,” she said, as if she had any idea what they were about to do to her backyard. “They really love you,” she said simply. “Dad and I do, too.” She smiled. “I just hope that, from here on out, you’ll count Cliff and I as a part of that group, because—because we really would do anything for you. And I will personally punch Xavier in the face if he even thinks about betraying you or any one of those witches out there.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Mom.” Although she did take a lot of kickboxing classes. For all I knew, she could have a pretty good left hook.
I sighed. Mom had been a lot of things to me over the years, including some bad things, but now more than ever, I was realizing that for all our differences, she had never failed to come through for me.
“I take that back,” I told her. “Feel free to punch Xavier whether he messes up or not.”
She smiled.
“And you were wrong before,” I told her. “You’ve been a wonderful mother to me.” My birth mother had foisted off her responsibilities on me and abandoned me. Hillary had always wanted me, then and now. “I just hope I’m as good to your grandbabies as you’ve been to me.”
Mom burst into tears and hugged me. I held her tight and felt every bit of her love.
“I’d do anything for you,” she murmured against my hair. “Anything. Even welcome Xavier into my house.”
I drew back. “Let’s get him out of here as soon as we can.”
“We will,” she said, wiping her tears and patting her hair. She nudged my plate. “Eat up,” she said, standing. “I’ve got to get this food out to the ladies before they start hunting down the local fauna.”
Maybe Mom knew more than she’d let on.
I ate, probably faster than I should have, but I was hungry, darn it.
Now that I’d decided to go with Xavier’s plan, now that I’d be going into the spirit realm tethered to my deadbeat dad, I needed all the strength I could get.
I finished the frittata, demolished the biscuit, and was sucking down the last of the coffee just as Hillary came back inside. “Oh good,” she said, taking in my empty plate. “You can help me carry out the mimosas.”
I needed to talk to Grandma anyway. No way was I finalizing any deals with Xavier before that. “They’re not really a mimosa crowd,” I told her as we picked up the trays of flutes and headed toward the back door.
“As I’ve heard your friend Ant Eater remark on more than one occasion now, ‘any booze is good booze,’” Hillary said primly as she nudged the door open with her knee. “If they don’t like it, they can change the flavor of it like they did with the tea at your bridal shower. Oh yes,” she added, arching her eyebrows at me as we headed out into the sunshine. “I know all about that now. At least they made mine champagne.”
It was a gorgeous morning, warm but not hot yet, the sunlight filtering irregularly through the canopy of the sugar maples that rose like Roman columns in the backyard. I had always liked it out here—when I was ten I’d decided to camp in the gazebo for a week and made Hillary and Cliff help me set it up like a bedroom. He’d even dragged my mattress down for me, and Hillary had pinned sheets up around it to make it seem like a princess bed.
Huh. I’d forgotten that until just now.
Currently the gazebo was nothing like a princess bed, unless your idea of a princess was a lazy dragon snoring hard enough that the shingles vibrated. Flappy sprawled across the ornamental benches and let his head dangle over one of the handrails. Pirate was trying, without success, to cajole him into playing.
“There are tennis balls! Golf balls! All kinds of balls here!” he said, jumping over Flappy’s tail as it swished back and forth. Aw, he must be dreaming. “You could try them all out if you just—Lizzie!” He noticed me and came running.
“No jumping!” I said when he got close. “I’m holding a lot of fragile things right now.”
Frieda sidled up to me and lifted the tray out of my hands. “Not any more, you’re not,” she said with a wink, smirking around her cigarette. Despite the fact that she was walking around in a thigh-high electric blue kimono, Frieda’s version of a bathrobe, her makeup was perfect. Maybe she’d had it tattooed. “I’ll get these wh
ere they need to go. You go talk with Gertie.” She nodded toward the toolshed on the periphery of the lawn, where I could see Grandma sitting on the seat of Cliff’s riding lawnmower, talking with Ant Eater and Creely.
“Lizzie!” Pirate looked up at me with huge soulful eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me you were having puppies?”
I choked on a laugh. “I’m not having puppies, I’m having babies,” I explained as I headed for the shed. Pirate trotted along beside me.
“Puppies, babies, same difference,” he said. “I’m going to love them so much.”
I smiled at him. “Me too, buddy.”
“And I can be your babysitter! I’ll teach them everything they need to know about scent marking, and how to lick themselves thoroughly, and how to stand up to cats. It’ll be great!”
“I’m sure you’ll do your very best.” And I would be right there in the same room the whole time. Just in case.
Grandma waved at me when I got close. She was already dressed for the day, in leather pants and a black T-shirt that read Bikers Don’t Go Gray: We Turn Chrome on it. “Good, you’re up,” she said, her voice rumbling like a diesel truck. “How’s the ward?”
I held up my wrist and showed it to her. “Still working.”
She grunted her approval and pushed a long strand of hair out of her face. “So, you talked to him.”
There was no need to clarify. “Yep.”
She glanced up toward the house. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s a terrible person with a rotten track record,” I replied frankly. “But…he makes a good case.” He always did.
“Yeah.” Grandma looked like she’d bitten into a persimmon. “He does. And I can’t say that he’s wrong, either.”
Ant Eater chuckled from where she sat on a coil of rubber hose, sipping at a flute that had changed color from sunny orange to whiskey brown. “And Gertie’s been trying to find a way to say that all morning.” She waggled a piece of salami at Pirate, who snarfed it up eagerly. I resisted the urge to lecture her about appropriate treats again. It would never stick.
Creely had her head bent over a well-used pad of paper, a pencil stub sticking out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s not a bad theory,” she said, staring at her calculations. “And it’s the only one we’ve found that gives Lizzie access to even a modicum of the power she’ll need in order to tangle with a spirit.”
“I was afraid of that.” The witches would have handled it themselves if they could.
The quick wince on Grandma’s face told me she felt the same. “Everything else we’ve come up with takes too much time to prepare, and that ward isn’t gonna last much more than another day. If that.”
I clutched the soft little bag, holding it tightly. A whisper ghosted across my mind, and I shivered.
He knew.
He was waiting.
“I can feel it,” I told them. “We don’t have long.”
Grandma frowned. “It doesn’t mean that your ‘person of interest,’” she said, making finger marks, refraining from saying my father’s name in case the spirit could be listening. “It doesn’t mean ‘he’ holds all the cards,” she said. “He’s lost most of his mojo. He can’t get you to the spirit realm on his own. To do that, we’re going to set up a Cave of Visions.”
“Mom mentioned that.” I nodded. “Care to tell me why?” The last time we’d needed a ceremony like that, Grandma had told me they’d moved beyond it.
She shook her head. “The Seer’s Ceremony is a hard one to control. Tougher still with a wild card like ‘the great Satan’ at the helm.”
“Satan?” I asked. “Really?”
Grandma shrugged. “We need a nickname for him. Anyhow”—she placed a hand on my shoulder—“I want a reliable spell that minimizes the danger to you, and that means the cave.”
“It’s more manipulable too,” Creely added. “Fewer variables to handle.”
Fewer variables, right. Last time, they’d used everything from skulls to guppies to armadillo tracks to get the cave going. Honestly, the construction of these things was beyond me, but it didn’t matter as long as they could make it what I needed.
I shivered, remembering the feeling of being sucked into the icy cold of the eleventh dimension by the succubus Serena. And now I was going to travel a place like that willingly, with only Xavier as my guide.
I had to be out of my mind.
A flute of orange juice appeared under my nose, held by a familiar hand. I took it and turned to Dimitri, who winked. “OJ and ginger ale,” he said, “I hear it’s good for morning sickness.”
I exhaled my feelings of stress and smiled up at my husband. “Why, thank you.”
He drew up next to me. “What’s the good news?”
I took his hand in mine. “Grandma wants to make a Cave of Visions for me and you-know-who to use.”
“The great Satan,” Grandma supplied.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Dimitri stated.
“Your husband just has to get to know me,” a familiar voice called.
Ah, and there was the man himself, swanning across the grass carrying his own flute, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“I’m sure that’s not it,” Dimitri fumed.
“All the players are here,” Xavier continued. “Now we just have to hope your witches can build us a stable enough portal into the spirit realm,” he added with a condescending nod to Grandma.
I could almost see the incantation dancing behind Grandma’s lips. Her hand twitched toward her stock of Smucker’s jars, but she stopped herself from throwing one. “We can handle our part if you can handle yours.”
Dimitri grabbed Xavier’s shirt and dragged him the rest of the way to our little circle. “You hurt Lizzie and you’re a dead man.”
“Ah,” Xavier said, attempting to extricate himself.
Dimitri didn’t make it easy.
“By the way, I’m going in with you,” he said, shoving Xavier away.
I couldn’t think of anything I’d like more, except…
Xavier was already shaking his head. “It won’t work,” he said, flinching, as if he expected Dimitri to grab him again. “I’m only strong enough to handle one passenger, and that has to be Lizzie. She’s going to have to sever the connection to the spirit on her own.”
“I can do it,” I assured him.
Dimitri looked like he wanted to shout with frustration. “You’re not the one I’m worried about,” he said, his murderous glare on Xavier.
My husband turned to me. “For all we know, this plan is just a way for Xavier to try to take your power, same as the spirit.”
Xavier sighed. The arrogance seeped out of him, and for a moment he looked like nothing more than a tired, worn-down old man. “I understand that I’ve done things in the past with…questionable motives,” he said, gazing straight at me. “I know you have very little reason to trust me. And that’s fair, I deserve that. I never was the father you wanted, and I know damn well I’m not the father you deserve.
“But, Lizzie”—and there was an earnestness to his voice that wouldn’t let me look away—“I mean it when I say that I’m only here to help. I will save my granddaughters and you, or die trying.”
My breath caught. Granddaughters? I was having girls?
“How do you know?” Dimitri asked, his voice raw. “How do you know they’re girls?”
Xavier’s chuckle had a sad ring to it. “An angel always knows. I may be a shadow of what I once was, but even I can see that far.”
Call it a mother’s intuition, but I had a feeling he was right about the babies being girls. And Grandma seemed to think this plan of his just might work as well.
“All right,” I said. I had my girls to think about now. I wasn’t going to let them down. “I can do this if you can.”
17
I wasn’t exactly a newbie when it came to using the Cave of Visions.
Well, okay, that wasn’t quite true. It wasn’t
a spell that I had ever cast, or that any individual witch could cast. It wasn’t really a spell at all, more like a way to open a conduit to another plane of existence. It was supposed to be safer than just hopping through a portal and winding up in enemy territory, although to be fair, I’d done that with a Cave of Visions too.
It hadn’t been my finest hour, but I’d lived to fight another day. That was pretty much my motto when it came to demon slaying.
The cave was different every time, but there were a few key components that stayed the same. One of them was that it took place in a small confined space, so when Grandma, Dimitri and I rolled to a stop that afternoon in front of a bowling alley, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
Grandma pulled in next to me and popped her kickstand down.
I took my helmet off and shook out my hair. “Why here?” I asked her. “Why not a graveyard?”
We were trying to reach the spirit realm, after all. It made sense that we’d want to be where the spirits were.
Grandma scoffed. “Are you kidding me? After the shitstorm that went down in the last cemetery we tangled in, you want to go make yourself vulnerable in one? No way, Lizzie. Graveyards might be rife with spiritual mojo, but there’s no telling how the people there died. With your luck lately, we’d end up tapping into the spirit of a mass murderer.”
Oof. The truth hurt. “So you’re saying this is where happy spirits hang out.”
I recognized this bowling alley—twenty years ago it had been Billy’s Bowling Bonanza, and a few of my classmates had thrown birthday parties here. I was a terrible bowler, and the pressure of performing in front of a bunch of judgmental preteens hadn’t improved my game. Every ball I threw had been a gutter ball, even when the lane had bumpers—I’d thrown the ball so wonky once that it had skipped into the neighboring lane.
I’d spent the rest of that party locked in a stall in the bathroom.
Now the name was Flower Power’s Bowl ’n Roll, but I still felt a residual rush of embarrassment just looking at it.