Freeing the Witch

by L. J. Longo

  Porter chuckled, embarrassed, and moved a little away. He sat up, curled one knee to his chest and stretched the other out. “Well, the moon is a white pearl, perfectly round. Spotted with soot. It hangs over the sand, just out of reach.”

  The world shifted as he spoke. The doors disappeared, swallowed in a gentle swirl of starlight and sand. And an endless desert flowered around them.

  “The sand rolls in mountains of diamonds and seeds, but there is no bird to pluck them up.” Porter sat with his eyes closed, leaning back. One of the dunes formed behind him to support his reclining, and he spread his arms wide and leaned on the sand.

  “There is only the wind. Cool and dry. Carrying the smell of kebabs.”

  And she could smell it, too. Roasted lamb in a spicy sauce. She laughed at the change in the world and the strange, isolated place he’d brought her. “It always ends with food for you.”

  “I like to eat.” He shrugged and reached out into the darkness, pulling a blanket from nowhere. He stood and swung it around his shoulders, then sat down next to her and invited her under the blanket.

  When she cuddled nearer to him, he produced a jug of the dusty red wine he preferred and offered it to her. “I like to drink.”

  She took a drink, as she always did to savor the full effect of his imagination.

  “I like to touch.” He nuzzled into her shoulder and made her spill the wine. Then licked it off her collarbone and breast. “And kiss.”

  Emaula set the jug down and arched back to offer her body to him. “What a hedonist…”

  “Wolf.”

  He continued kissing, lavishing attention on her breasts, and she relaxed watching the moon and starlight. She wasn’t expecting it when he kissed her throat and drew away. “Emaula, how do we break your curse?”

  She sat straighter. “You can’t.”

  “If you walked the path, would you escape her?”

  Emaula startled back. “How do you know about that?”

  Porter slipped back, leaving her with the blanket. “You magic is … a bit wild sometimes. And birds in the cage.”

  He drank from his wine bottle, and Emaula waited for him to continue. Instead, he looked up at the sky.

  Emaula had the terrible fear Mother had infiltrated the dream and was talking to her through her lover. It sickened her. “What about them, Porter?”

  He startled at her angry tone, and Emaula cringed at her own foolish fear.

  “Oh, well, even the ones who flew away came back to take the walk. Then they’d be free and their power would be obedient. How is it done with you?”

  “Similarly,” Emaula said. “A crone sets the destination. A mother makes the path. A maiden walks the path. She must avoid temptations and straying to reach the crone and receive her wisdom.”

  “That’s how it is done with them as well.” Porter stretched his arms back, flexing his muscles in a way that was only partly accidental.

  “Were you a temptation along the road?”

  “Well, I wasn’t a guide.” He laughed, and then his expression darkened. He took another drink. “That’s not true. Sometimes I was. I tried to help.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded. “Always. They wanted to be free so badly. But no one trusted me.”

  Porter smiled at his memory. “Sometimes, I’d give such bad advice they outwitted me and knew the right way to go.”

  What a hero. “I see why The Munawn set you free.”

  “Free?” Porter shrugged. “She said she might someday, but she has not.”

  Emaula leaned closer to touch his leg. Porter misunderstood and smiled and handed her the jug. “You’re not free, Porter?”

  “No, I’m locked in my room,” he said. “She just turned me out.”

  Emaula looked at him without understanding.

  Porter gave up before he tried to express the idea. “It doesn’t have to be her, of course. Any of the birds could. They always say they’ll take you with them, but they never do. I was not special.”

  Porter drifted out of their dream-state, retreating into a deeper place. “I wasn’t alone. I mean, all of us get left behind. Wolves, tigers, elephants. Everyone.”

  “I’d take you with me,” Emaula promised.

  She noticed the doors, popping into one of the dunes and if she wasn’t mistaken the lights of auras beneath them. Were there witches still tied to Porter? Still watching him? Or was he accidentally reaching out to them?

  She took his hand and focused on the sand dunes and the cool breeze to better create their little world. “I promise I would, Porter.”

  Porter shrugged. The kind of careless gesture that she knew meant he cared quite deeply. “They all say that. They all say they will trust you. They all say they love you. But…”

  He paused, then drank again. “They can’t. That’s just the way it is … with witches. In my experience.”

  He’d had this conversation before. How many times had he had this conversation? A witch could take an old soul and place it into a new wolf whenever she wanted. Emaula had the overwhelming sense that Porter had lived lifetimes of service to women who could not love or trust him, to witches who had not cared enough for him to take him with them.

  “I must be very tired to talk about myself like this.” Then, he laughed softly and squeezed her hand. Kissed her fingers. “If you say you’ll take me, I believe you.”

  Porter leaned closer to kiss her, and Emaula leaned slightly away.

  He crumbled with shame. “Do you want me to go away?”

  “No.” Emaula threw her arms around him and hugged him close. “I want you to actually believe me. I wouldn’t leave you. I would take you.”

  He said nothing. There was nothing to say. He didn’t believe her. But he kissed her neck and stroked her sides in a way that made her body tingle.

  Emaula pushed him away.

  Porter recoiled, chastised, and she took his hands and forced him to look into her face. “Porter, I promise, someday, I will walk the path, and I’ll take you with me.”

  He smiled. Such a bright dazzling smile, even when he was clearly unconvinced. “Okay.”

  “Port—”

  But he interrupted her with kisses, and this time she let him distract her.

  ****

  Emaula woke alone in her bedroom. Emaula wasn’t certain what could have caused her to leave such a sweet dream behind since night blanketed the sky. The real world felt strange. The darkness sinister.

  Then something softly knocked on her door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Shh.” Her door opened a crack. Sock, sallow, starved, and distorted by the shadows of his lantern, entered. The sage floated up toward the ceiling, and he gestured for her to join him in the hallway.

  Emaula would have thought the strange sight was a dream if she hadn’t become so intimately familiar recently with the sleeping world. She wrapped her robe loosely around her nightgown and came into the hallway.

  Sock made a gesture like covering his mouth, then pointed up.

  Emaula looked up. The same strange shadows she’d glimpsed in her room ages ago danced over the ceiling. Sock extended the lantern, lifting the fire higher. A web caught the sage and drank the smoke. Definitely dark energy.

  She did not speak, recalling how the energy had fled at the sound of her voice before. The energy reminded her of something cold and ancient. Stone and caves. But it was alive and vibrant, more like a spider’s web.

  Sock led her up the stairs to the highest story of the building, then toward the window at the end of the hallway. He handed her the lantern and unbuttoned the rice-paper shutter over the window. Then he jumped into the sill and gestured for her to follow.

  Goddess, he wanted her to climb out onto the rooftop with him? He didn’t look at her. Just adjusted his spectacles and then climbed up to the roof.

  Emaula dipped the lantern first and peered her head out of the building.

  Sock crawled toward the rooftop, surpris
ingly agile for a cursed wolf losing his sight. He reached down and opened and closed his hand. Oh, he wanted the lantern.

  Emaula put the stick into his hand, and he swung the lantern out over the side of the building to cast light for her. When she hesitated, he gestured with his other hand for her to hurry.

  So, Emaula carefully followed him out onto the ledge. It reminded her unpleasantly of crawling out the window of her mother’s tower. The darkness seemed to go on forever below her feet. Not just the night. More of that energy twisted like a net beneath her. She stretched her hand from the window to the edge of the roof and found the sill made quite a good foothold. She clambered after Sock.

  By the time, she gathered herself on her hands and knees on the roof, the little wolf stood in the middle of the roof and brought the sage-infused lantern close to his face. He blew on the flame, and the force of his breath—perhaps a little more magic than a wolf rightly ought to have—carried the smoke all around him. It swirled into the sky, showing a vast network of dark energy twining around the chimney.

  Sock whispered so softly she only caught a few words. “Seen any … like … before?”

  Emaula shook her head solemnly and whispered back. “Read about it.”

  She walked carefully toward the chimney. Under the lip, a bird had built a small nest. Not big enough to disrupt the smoke, hardly big enough to be noticed in the darkness.

  The roof tiles slipped under her feet, and Emaula breathed a little spell to steady herself. It was a crow’s nest, abandoned or never used, though it was perfectly shaped. Protected by the chimney from the rain. When she took it in her hands, she saw bits of paper woven into the twigs. She could barely make out her own handwriting. The childish scrawl of a young girl copying out a spell to boil water.

  Emaula glanced at the dark energy all around. She never noticed it because it was too familiar. Her constant companion, as natural to her as starlight and sunshine.

  “Mother.”

  At the word, the dark energy crumbled. Emaula stood alone on the roof with Sock and the sage smoke.

  “Well.” Sock leaned against the lantern’s pole. “Guess it wasn’t you.”

  Emaula glared at the nest until it caught fire in her hand. The ash dispersed in the wind. “That should be the end of that.”

  “It was stronger than usual tonight.” Sock headed back to the window they’d come in from. “That’s why I went to you. I never thought twice about the nest. It looked so natural.”

  “She owned the paper inside it,” Emaula admitted. “It’s all gone now. She can’t come back.”

  “She doesn’t have to.” Sock said. “She did something just now. Didn’t you feel that …surge? Like a wave?”

  Emaula had felt nothing. She’d been dreaming with Porter, completely unaware of any danger. Now she was desperately angry with this little man for distrusting her when he ought to be seeking her wisdom. “You ought to have come to me sooner. What did she do?”

  Emaula’s skin crawled with fear. But nothing felt wrong. She was unchanged. Her aura when she focused on it the same lonely curse. Maybe all Sock’s paranoid smudging had saved her from her mother. Maybe the distance was too great and even this “surge” hadn’t been enough for Mother to harm her.

  Emaula looked at the stars in the sky and scowled at the trace of her mother. It didn’t matter what she had tried to do. Emaula would burn that woman herself if she came near here.

  Chapter Two

  Porter felt himself slipping into his real place while he was talking to Emaula in the desert place. His head swam, and he could hear the others listening in their dreams. Probably just a fluke. Some lonely witch trying to reach him.

  It didn’t matter. He had the keys. He wouldn’t let her in.

  Even after Emaula slipped away, he found himself drawn into a deeper dream, into the strangeness of his real room. Maybe Emaula had woken up, and she was trying to find her way back to him. They’d meet here, and he’d make a door to elsewhere.

  Either way, he nestled into the bed and waited.

  And waited.

  No door opened.

  Instead, something tiny scuttled behind him. Something small came under a door. His short hairs prickled, and he paid closer attention to the room.

  He wasn’t alone, but whoever was there kept well hidden. And she was not Emaula.

  Porter glanced at all the doors, securely locked and bolted. But each had space at the bottom, as always, room enough for spiders.

  A tiny soft voice, a little girl, whined plaintively.

  Room for starlight as well. When Porter turned, the world swirled. A child stood in front of him, and they were in the deep forest. It wasn’t like the jungle. Different. A crisper, colder, older place.

  But the child dressed in jungle vines and patched cotton. The sort of costume the local village wolves wore, disposable, and easily replaced. She was old enough for language, maybe even learning to hunt. Her skin was brown as river clay, and her hair was dark and curly. But her eyes were as blue as Emaula’s.

  “Hello there.” Porter greeted the child. “I know you.”

  She bashfully turned her big eyes away but asked boldly, “Then, what’s my name?”

  “Edlis. Maybe Lady Eddy.” He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward to study her better. “Is that right?”

  The little girl nodded and bit her lip. The same way Emaula did.

  “This is exciting.” Porter felt his tail wagging somewhere. “Would you like to go into the forest? I can show you good food to eat?”

  No, he ought to do something more human with her. Try to raise a little girl, not an animal.

  “Or I should tell you a story?”

  She nodded and crept forward. Porter didn’t recognize the strange moss and ferns covering the ground, but there was something distinctly un-wolfish in the way she sensibly plucked her way down the rocky slope.

  She put her paw—her hand on his knee and crawled into his lap, soft and warm and precious. “Tell me how you met Mama?”

  Porter scratched his ear and looked into the girl’s perfectly blue eyes. No starlight in those eyes. “She came to take over in the kitchen. We fought because the kitchen was my territory. We learned to share the kitchen with each other, and now we are happy, and I love her.”

  She grinned wide. Her teeth were tiny and perfect little squares. No trace of wolf in this girl. “Thank you, Papa. I’m so happy I got to meet you before I disappear.”

  Porter tilted his head. “Disappear?”

  “Papa!” She grinned as if he were a fool. “I can’t appear if you and Mama can’t make me.”

  “That is true.” Porter nodded.

  “Maybe I can help. I have a potion. If you drink it, you could touch her.” She produced a small flask, the sort Northerners put hard liquor in. It was too real. “Do you want it?”

  How different everything would be if he could actually touch Emaula. Not even the sex—though that would be a treat—but to stroke her hand when they sat together, to rub her back when it ached from cooking all day. Porter sensed binding magic in the air, an unspoken agreement between himself and this creature in his lap. If he took the flask and drank…

  “Please, Papa. I don’t want to disappear.”

  Porter took the flask, opened it. The little girl watched him. For the first time, her face appeared wolf-like. Hungry and impatient.

  “Please?”

  Porter overturned the flask and poured out her spell. “Perhaps, if a certain spider-woman wants a granddaughter so badly, she should let her daughter be free and stop trying to trick simple wolves.”

  The little girl scampered away, and the woods swirled into deep darkness. But Porter heard her feet tickling the edges of the room.

  “How did you know?”

  He stood and crept silently. He reached for a door. He needed to wake up. Wake up and go to Emaula. And then they’d go to Yenna.

  “Speak, wolf,” the witch commanded.

 
Porter obeyed the command. She hadn’t left him the choice, and it made him ill. No one had forced him to speak since The Munawn. “I’m good at telling real and unreal from partly real.”

  The spider wove a cage in the darkness. “What an interesting skill for a simple man.”

  Porter did not respond to her flattery. He moved toward the closest door, creeping on his belly. But he smelled the web and squirmed in the other direction.

  “What else does my daughter see in you, besides an endless stomach to consume her beauty, and youth, and life?”

  What did she see in her daughter except something to eat? Porter clenched his jaw to keep from answering. She didn’t want an answer. Really, she didn’t. That was what Sock called rhetorical. She wanted silence.

  He stepped over one of the webs, reached for a knob.

  “Answer me,” she commanded.

  “We talk.” He turned the knob, hoping for the best. He needed light. Needed to wake up a little. “Share recipes.”

  The room beyond already belonged to the spider. Full of darkness. No moonlight. A draft of cold wind swirled against him. No moonlight, but he still howled as loudly as he could. Dry webbing—no. The hairs of the spider’s body—brushed his face.

  Her magic squeezed in on him. Porter rolled away, then ran blindly and silently. He stopped against every instinct in his body—be a man, not an animal. Then remained crouched and kept very still and silent.

  “Already scared?”

  He did not speak. Her massive darkness moved over his head. He crawled away from her but matched his movements to her footsteps.

  Door. There were so many doors. He only needed one.

  “You have no courage, wolf. A real man would fight.”

  His fingers brushed bamboo, and he pulled the hemp knot of a cheap Southern door. Moonlight poured into the room.

  He rushed forward to escape, to wake up from this nightmare.

  Instead, something wet and sticky caught his leg. He held the doorjamb and howled. It didn’t matter who came. Emaula, or Nav, or anyone.

  The spider laughed and pulled him hard.

  He clutched the door and howled. She bound him tighter in her threads.

  “Port?” Sock’s voice too calm to compete with the noise of a laughing spider and the spinning of her web. “Wake up, buddy. You’re having a nightmare.”