“Whatever you do, you are not to pity me, Jaz. My blessing has been my curse.” There was so much I wished to say. But how did I confirm that these moments with Shem was the price the gods determined for me to have this chance at an extended life and purpose? “We’ve been through so much, and I couldn’t allow you to worry about me and my finding my place. Shem found someone else already, anyway.”
“Who, Felicia?”
“Girl, no. Some girl who calls herself Butterscotch. She probably works down at his office. It would explain the strange perfume and lipstick on his collar.”
“Why did he get married then? Shem was always one for instant gratification. I’m so sorry, Tink.” She leaned forward and gave me the tightest hug ever. It was the hug of sisterhood, friendship, and family. It was everything I’d come to cherish over the years, and did everything to protect. “I do believe you are so special that you will find more than enough love.”
From your mouth to the gods’ ears, I thought. I’d spread my love so thin I didn’t even consider love to be a gift given, respected, and cherished. Not something hidden under a shuffle, doused in loads of conflict and crap, or mistaken for heartburn.
“Well, I think we need to have some fun.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Shem is an idiot. You two could have had everything together, but nothing works as well as finding someone else.”
“I’m not in a rush to find anyone. The thing I want to do tomorrow is head to the court and find out how to get the annulment. I already have grounds.”
“Besides the cheating, what?”
“Fraud. I married him because I thought he was one thing, but he turned out to be someone I didn’t want to even know.”
“No matter what happens between you and him, you will be my forever friend, Tink. I promised that then, and I promise it again now.”
“Ohh, are you swearing fealty? I need witnesses.”
Jaz then pretended to take out a violin to play it.
“What does that mean?”
“You’re getting your solo.”
I picked up a pillow from the sofa and hit her with it.
“Are you starting a fight?”
She tossed a pillow back, and continued to play the world’s tiniest violin.
I then pretended to strum a guitar, and performed my rock solo.
“Let’s make this more interesting,” I said and removed my wand, “Musik voila.”
Instruments appeared and played. Yep, an unmanned rock symphony to wash away the night’s ick. We continued to rock out, and throw pillows, because that’s what sisters did.
The door flew open and in walked Erich.
“You really need to start locking the door,” he said, and stared with his mouth gaping open at the instruments playing, feathers fluttering around. “Hey Sis, what are you doing here?”
“We’re celebrating,” Jaz said before I could respond.
“Yeah, and what’s with the small bag there?”
“Tink’s going to move in.”
Erich frowned.
“I don’t think that’s a great idea, Jaz,” I said. “You need your privacy. Erich has such a big house in Oregon Hill, I could stay there.”
“No, it’s being treated for termites. To be honest, let’s go get your stuff now.” Jaz lowered her voice. “And since I’m not a cop anymore, I’m sure we can get some white shoe polish.”
“What are going to do with that?” I asked. Neither of us wore white shoes or shoes that needed polishing.
“Give him notice that this sham is over.” She raised and shook the bottle of shoe polish in the air.
Erich walked over and wrapped his arm around Jaz’s waist. “You seem a little too happy about this. Got something you want to tell me?”
Jaz chuckled. “Nope.”
She then leaned in and gave him a kiss that made me glance away. I cleared my throat.
“Sorry.” She broke away wiping her lips, and Erich looked quite sheepish. “Yeah, no one deserves to be unhappy. Life is too short for a bad marriage, to be cheated on, and horrible sex.”
I stuck my index fingers into my ears. The last thing I wanted to think about was these two doing their dirty deeds. Erich was my brother, at least, we’d been together long enough to think of each other as family, and that was not going to change.
“Not me, right?” I heard him say. He then turned back to me. “You’re not going to change your mind, kiss and make up?”
“Not on your life, even Mother agrees. Since she is having fun with her new boy toy, so she’s not wanting any of us to suffer in a bad relationship, and I don’t want to be at the house should she decide to do the horizontal mambo.”
We must have both gotten strange weirded-out expressions on our faces as Jaz erupted into laughter. “Yeah, no one wants to imagine their parent as sexually active.”
“That doesn’t sound like Mom at all,” I chided. Our mother, the goddess of death herself—Lady Hel, had been playing the field, and since she was no longer spending time in Helheim, but above ground on some gothic estate, she seemed more intense and intent on finding Mr. Right, and not merely a warm body. Even more, since she liked to wear tight BDSM leather while in the wooing phase, I personally didn’t want to think about her love of latex and where it led with her young ones. She was in her cougar phase.
“What’s the difference between a MILF and a cougar?” Jaz clapped her hands. “Point of view. Get it.”
Erich and I both groaned.
“Stop, we don’t want those images, Jaz,” Erich said.
Jaz tapped her nose. “For the life of me, I know she doesn’t like me. At least I can make this one point uncomfortable for us all.”
“Well, this is the beginning of her new boy-toy courtship,” I said. “He might not last as long as the last one. This one keeps talking about his love of the Russian Revolution and Rasputin.” I rolled my eyes. Lady Hel was particular about who she liked, and I was sure I only got the adopted daughter treatment because I’d helped look after Erich all these years, and because he declared me to be under his protection. That didn’t seem to work with Jaz and Erich, though. The tension over the holiday table could be something fierce when it came to those two. I shuddered recalling the vitriol.
“Let’s strike while the iron’s hot and go and get your things.”
After all Jaz had gone through with Shem, I wasn’t sure what she’d do when and if she saw Shem. They had been friends, thicker than thieves, but once we returned from Thule, things changed. She didn’t spend as much time with Shem. I wasn’t sure if it had to do with her new relationship with Erich, but it sure did make it easier to find ways to make this relationship come to an end.
“Shem is a jerk,” Jaz said and strutted toward the door.
“What about this mess here?” Erich called after us.
I waved my wand, “Aufraumen,” and the instruments stopped their playing and instead started to clean.
“Is that how you kept the apartment so clean?” Jaz asked. “Is there anything you can’t do?”
“Some things I still have to finesse and use my spell books for, but my most common spells, I know and can also do it wandless.”
We left Jaz’s apartment and it was dark outside. The streetlights burned, and the heavy traffic slowed down to a pace of a Sunday stroll down in the Shockoe Bottom.
“It’s a shame he didn’t understand you weren’t his property,” Jaz said.
“Yeah, and it’s a sad thing. Shem changed on a dime. I do think you’re hanging around at the apartment kept us together.”
“Why?”
“He thought you were still there to accept him back if anything went south. When you left, and no longer were an option, he lost his shit.”
Jaz stopped in her tracks. “That’s his truck, right? I’m surprised Erich didn’t sic Minsk, Ajax, and Sasha on him?”
As a necromancer, Erich had carried Minsk, Ajax, and Sasha with him fo
r years hoping for a day of resurrection. Once Jaz gifted Erich her heart though, the three men had been freed from their ready-made cell of Erich’s person.
Parallel parked on the street, a large black pickup truck stood with a Yeti bumper sticker.
“You think he’s in there with her?” Jaz asked.
“We don’t need to know. We could head back to your place, grab my stuff another day.” I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking. Every minute spent concentrating on what could be, kept me from acting, and that was already my bad habit: inaction, followed by second-guessing. “Maybe we shouldn’t,” I countered.
“Tink?” We stopped for a minute as Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” played in a car passing by. “Ah, got it. That is what you need. An anthem to get you moving.”
“I’m not a superhero.”
“But you could be. Sometimes you have to stop trying to live and simply do it. Here, let’s find a song that makes you move, so you don’t have to think to do those actions, but can see it through automatically.”
“Like what?”
“Lord knows, the Queen Bee is exactly what you need to recover. Why not choose something from her.”
“‘Single Ladies’ it is,” I announced, and raised my hand.
“Okay, start humming it and burst your magical moves. I’m a freaking dragon, Tink. Come on, give me some cover. Right now, he’s getting close to some woman who doesn’t have a clue, and that truck looks too nice not to make a memento of his being an ass.”
“Jaz, don’t make it too obvious.”
“We’re saving the next woman from his chauvinism.” Jaz dashed across the street, behind the marketplace to an empty parking lot.
I strutted into the middle of traffic and stood there, raising my hands and extending my wand, focusing the magical energy. Orange and red light formed, and everything stopped.
Jaz, in dragon form, swept up and plopped down on his truck. All of the metal crunched together like I’d stepped on a soda can. The windows popped and shattered. The paint chipped. Jaz quickly shot back into the night sky.
“He so loves his truck,” I said as she joined me crossing the street again.
I lowered my hands and the cars beeped, the truck’s alarm blared, and an erratic Shem dashed out of the bar with a silky-haired brunette not far behind him.
“See, it’s good to be a dragon’s witch.”
“Oh, it’s better than good, Jaz, to have a dragon as a friend. I don’t think his car insurance covers dragon damage.” I couldn’t stop the chortle furling out.
“Now let’s get your stuff so we can head to the masquerade tonight,” Jaz said over her shoulder with a wink.
“Then we’ll start your training, Jaz.”
My phone buzzed alerting me to a text message, and I glanced down at the screen. The message simply read: office.
Crap, looked like it was back to business, and Jaz would have to wait a bit.
What could be so urgent that Mia, the librarian, would send me a text instead of her personal assistant?
Guess it was time to find out.
Chapter Four
TINK
I headed into the station to gather the daily report. Headquarters for me was located in the newly remodeled train station in Shockoe Bottom, one of the most expensive places in the city. It also offered a great vantage point.
Since the train station there had odd hours, it didn’t get the usual barrage of traffic like the one further out. Here, with the shiny design, no one paid any attention to the brass glass doors that read “EMPLOYEES ONLY” in large bold lettering. If someone got lost, they’d only stumble in to what appeared to be an office with local visitor information materials—info about local ghosts tours, Hollywood Cemetery, and Tobacco Row.
Behind the shelves and brochures, barely on the other side of the fake wall, led a corridor to an elevator which would take me to an underground bunker where people and supernaturals like me met up.
I waved at the woman at the desk, bypassed the stacks of papers she’d put out, and slid my key card waiting for the red light to illuminate green, and the elevator doors to open.
The loudspeaker played Puccini’s, “Nessun Dorma,” and I sang along. The golden doors opened and, instead of a dark and dank underground bunker, it was a bright and airy space decorated in overhead pop ceiling lighting, with the walls painted in floral whites, light cyan, and goldenrod-yellowish hues. The floor’s colors of Gainesboro and slate gray perfectly complimented the esthetic.
I waved at my colleagues and headed toward the large, blue, hanging barn door, and there Mia was, the librarian, her head bent down as she pored over another record or two.
The meticulously decorated office smelled of vanilla from the candles she had lit on the fireplace mantle. And the opposite back wall of her office was filled with colossal tomes of various colors, thick, all with different theories and knowledge of the dragons and their world.
Mia glanced between the pointer she was using to read her notebook, and quickly scribbled something down, only to then look back at the book.
The supernatural world and its genesis weren’t as straight of a line as many thought. In fact, it seemed when Jaz headed back to the past, she’d opened Pandora’s Box of creatures. Everything once hidden was now out in the open, just glamoured to appear more humanoid in appearance.
Mia’s wavy blonde hair, barely touched her petite shoulders. Slender and more like a model in stature, she didn’t look like a bookworm at all—whatever that meant. Of course, she was also super important, for she made sure all of my information was up to date and accurate. Just imagine the problems of offing the wrong entity. Ouch!
Entering Mia’s office, my gaze landed directly on her desk, piled high with stacks of papers, on an older sketch according to the gold leaf on the yellowed page.
“I got your message. What’s that?” I asked. Mia looked up and frowned, crinkling her nose.
She crinkled her nose. A natural introvert, I’d often had harder times connecting with her, although she wasn’t cold. I’d like to think it was because she had problems trying to get out all of the words in her head. She was smart, and probably the most intelligent person I’d met along this endless journey. She mentally categorized information and seemed to spout it out with a snap of her fingers. For some people, the weather was small talk. For Mia, it was asking about her latest find.
Mia’s frown lightened with a wink. “More and more records have popped up about the wyvern.”
“The what?”
“Yes, they are not as well-known as their cousin. They first became known in the thirteenth century. Think of them as the cheap dragon, dragon-like head and wings, and sometimes a reptile body, even a snake one. Instead of four legs, it usually walked on two. From what we know, and this is not the rule, there are serious exceptions. When the wyverns appear in the timeline, they bring death with them.”
“They are bringers of death?”
She nodded. “I hypothesize from the record’s contents that they transmit plagues, to be honest. I mean, I’m still digging, but whenever the wyvern are mentioned, there is an uptick in human illnesses. Think about it—the Black Death is from the thirteenth century. The wyvern, also called wyver, from the Latin word for snake, is where we get the word viper. In Western society, viper has never had a positive connotation, especially after the expansion of Christianity, and the story of the snake in the Garden of Eden. Or maybe…oh, I got it! What if they were called vipers because they were venomous?” Mia flipped more through her book. “I mean, the vipera berud or European viper is venomous and most would have been wary of it. Oh, I say, how clever.”
“We don’t have any around here, right?”
“Nope, none on the radar, but when something like this comes to my attention, I have to make sure to investigate it, too.”
She removed a black bowl filled with water from under her desk.
“You’re the foremost witch in our employ, and since
this is not coming down from the top, could you do me a favor and look?”
Mia didn’t usually ask for a favor, so she must have been concerned, even more so than what she was letting on.
“You blessed this water during your full moon ritual, and the fullness of the moon’s creative energy, expanding energy, but what we need from this is to see the dark forces. So take this away and let’s clean out the bowl.” I then drew a backward pentagram inside the bowl. “Just get me plain rainwater.” I pulled out my vial of blessed water and called on Lady Hel. “This is dew gathered from hemlock during the dark of the moon. The ritual calls in Hel. Hel’s omniscience, along with the power of the dark moon ritual, will allow me to see into the shadows.”
“The essence of hemlock that was carried by the water will give us protection against hunters and evildoers, so we don’t connect.” Mia nodded her head in understanding.
Staring into the bottom of the bowl, the water was clear. All I saw was darkness, but darkness from the bowl gave way to massing clouds. Scrying could show me my future, but it could also show the past or the present.
The scene formed before me of a Renaissance-styled battle. But this was different. Winged beasts flew overhead. But they weren’t dragons. Although their heads were shaped like dragons, their bodies were more reptilian, even in color with their muted greens and browns. Certainly not as vibrant as the dragon. They also had two legs instead of four, and their pointy tails rose and fell with each pull of their wings.
These were indeed wyvern.
But they weren’t alone. A large iridescent black-and-scarlet dragon screeched and roared behind them. It was as if they’d saved the best of weapons for last. They led him, and then he broke away. He did a pass by and then blasted fire on those on the battlefield below, and the wyverns followed, swooping down to the waiting army. Foot soldiers with basic armor fought off what looked like well-trained soldiers. Swords slashed, and the dragon’s fire created a sure path.
A Dragon’s Witch Page 4