“I’m not an ordinary witch.”
“She’s a head of a house,” GiGi says from her chair. “You kill her, and you’ve attacked a power base, opening yours to be attacked by any other head of house. The vampires have been wanting more area to control for decades. You might as well fly a banner letting them know to come on down.”
Whatever remark Roman had, Isabell whines to stop him. He glances to her, reading something in those eyes so close to his own coloring.
“She brought back an army of supernatural beings,” GiGi reminds him.
“And all before noon. You should have seen what the rest of my day entailed. I’m really tired so if you could just tell me what this little drop in is about, that would be great for both of us.”
My magic has grown, answering my skipping heart’s panic. It’s wrapped its long tail around my body, filling the area around me with a green haze of light. I know if I don’t stop my racing heart my magic will continue to grow, filling my eyes and skin with its glowing lights. It will push this verbal stand off to a level I’m not sure I’m ready to handle.
“I want my family members to be put to rest. What Deon has done is one thing, but this,” he looks to where the wolves are standing in a line with their mangled bodies and blank eyes, “this is something utterly different.”
“And if they are put to rest, how do we know you won’t come and do something stupid?” GiGi asks, and I understand where I get my false bravado from after hearing her.
Roman sighs, letting the predator side of him slip away with the air from his lungs. Holding his hands in a surrender pose, he says with an honesty that reaches his eyes, “I don’t want to fight with you or any house. I just want to live in peace with my family. I knew the night you came out Deon wouldn’t rest until we owned you like we own the other powerful witches. I knew you would be trouble for my family. I just didn’t know it would be this kind of trouble. I have handled Deon. In good faith, for both of us, put my family to rest so I may bury them where they belong. They didn’t deserve to die like this. They definitely don’t deserve to live like this.”
He looks to have aged while pleading his case, but to also have lost years, making him seem vulnerable and tender hearted. I can’t argue with the truth of his words. At least not the truth behind the fact they don’t deserve this. The rest is lies and hidden motives to my skeptical mind.
“Asking for peace while using the word ‘own’ is an interesting strategy,” I tell him, bringing voice to my concerns.
He nods, looking more and more like a lost youth than a threating boogey man.
“I’ll put them to rest,” I’m drumming my fingers on the glass counter as if in thought. “But I’ll keep them, for now. Once I know the rest of the witches are safe, that we’re safe, I will release them to you to take home.”
Isabell whines again when Roman’s mouth opens.
“I think you should listen to your cousin,” GiGi offers from the side lines.
Roman nods with a face less than agreeable. “For now,” he repeats.
“Just until I can trust you and yours.” I smile with what I hope looks caring and not mocking. “You haven’t exactly proven your family to be of the neighborly type.”
“Where will they rest?” he asks with gritted teeth holding back the things he really wants to ask.
I walk towards to the basement door, mentally summoning my furry death squad to follow me down. The wooden stairs complain with our weight, creaking and moaning with hints of their age and limitations.
The basement is exactly what most basements are, cold, dusty, and mostly used for storage for the things we have no idea what to do with on a daily basis. Which is what makes it the perfect place for them to be placed, for now, as I was reminded.
“They will be safe here,” I tell Roman, who has only come half the way down.
He is looking around the now tight space with an appearance of neutral interest. I know a part of him wants to rebel against this, to force his hand and see where the cards land. I also know a part of him wants to go back to that night with his father with hopes to somehow prevent all of this from ever happening. I know all of this because, just as he can hear my heart, I can feel the magic which makes him what he is, filled with remorse and trepidation.
“I promise you nothing will happen to them. Once we leave this room, I will seal the door so that no one other than myself, or of my blood, may open it,” I say to reassure him, but to also let him know if anything happens to me, GiGi will be able to seek her revenge. Unfortunately, there seems to be no secrets in the paranormal world.
“There is no one left of your blood,” Roman says to me, filling his words with a curious pitch.
“I bound her to me when she was little,” GiGi remarks from the top of the stairs. “As far as magic is concerned, we are blood and blood we shall be until blood pours no more.”
“I don’t need the line, Jo. I’m well aware how the spell works,” he tells her, never glancing up where she stands.
“I guess that’s why you have so many cousins,” I hear myself say, and quickly try to recover. “Alright, so let’s get this done?”
Before he can remark on my momentary slip of madness, I pull the jade fire around me. I pull it close like a second skin to build its strength and warmth. When the false flames start to devour me, I send it to each of the wolves. Spreading like wildfire around the room, each of them start to glow from the flame’s light. I let it cover the wolves, the room, and the air around us until there is room for nothing else in this small space.
I don’t want to do what I have to do next. My chest already feels as if the weight of the magic is crushing me, breaking my ribs to return to its source. I have expanded it to search for all traces of itself and now it wants to come home. All of it wants to come home.
“Damnit,” I whisper before I inhale and brace for the return.
Like a vacuum, the flames retreat from the room, rushing back to me with a speed that bows my chest inward from the collision. As it retreats, the magic is pulled from the wolves and they fall, one by one, back to the deaths they were granted hours ago. With the magic gone, their bodies return to their human forms. Without the fur to hide the wounds, Roman sees more than he ever wanted to about what happened in that house. He can now see the true horrors the members of his family faced and the horrors to which they lost.
I can barely breath with the magic inside of me. It feels as if it’s breaking bones, tearing apart tendons and thicker meats inside of me to make itself a new home. The pain brings tears to my eyes and robs the strength from my legs. Kneeling, panting, and almost crying, I am surrounded by the Ripples I helped to kill, twice now.
“You should go, Roman,” GiGi tells him, seeing my distress and unsure exactly what he will do seeing his family in such a way.
“Give me your word, Necromancer,” Roman whispers with a voice soft with rage and unsaid threats.
“I hate that title,” I say between fighting for air.
He chuckles a sound of false amusement. “We don’t get to pick our titles, Harper. Life does that for us. Promise me they will be safe.”
“I promise they will be safe,” I repeat the words I hope I can keep.
As he climbs the stairs, I hear him say, “I wish we had met under different circumstances, Harper. We might have been friends.”
“Friends are just people who are better at hiding their daggers. I like it better this way. This way I won’t be shocked when you stab her in the back, wolf,” GiGi says with all the salt and vinegar I’ve come to love her for owning. “Get out of my shop and the next time you barge in here with false threats, and more penis than sense, I may just hand you your balls.”
“I don’t doubt you’d try, Jo,” I hear him tell her from where I am still kneeling amid the dead. “I don’t doubt you’d try.”
The little bell over the entrance door rings a sound I’ve never been so happy to hear. The sl
iding of the dead bolt makes me almost giddy. I lay my face on the cold stone floor and stare into the empty eyes of the woman nearest to me.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her lifeless body. “I’m so sorry.”
The last words I hear before I slip under the waves of exhaustion is from the woman I have come to know as my family and savior.
“None of this is your fault, Harper. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
But she’s wrong. I have many things to be sorry for, but for now, they are my little secret.
“She has to know everything,” Regan says from the other room, and I can’t remember when she arrived.
In fact, even as I know I have been sitting here, in our little kitchen nook, I can’t remember how I got here or how long I have been sitting at the table. The coffee is cold. My ass is numb. Putting the clues together, I’m guessing for some time.
“It would only put her in more danger,” GiGi tells whoever is in there, gossiping about me as if I’m not sitting here, numb with cold coffee.
“She can’t get in that much more danger!” Regan shouts, totally blowing the attempted cover up of their conversation.
“I mean, I could. It’s only what, Thursday? There’s still a whole day to end the week on an epic fail,” I say to my depressing coffee and the two women sitting in a room they thought was soundproof.
“Glad to hear you’re back with the living,” Regan tells me through the wall. “Might as well come in.”
My body protests the idea. Everything, and everywhere, hurts. It’s the type of ache which makes you want to drown your sorrows in a hot bath and under a warm blanket. Neither of these things I imagine I will get to do tonight.
Regan is sitting with her legs tucked up under her in the large recliner. Her jeans are dark and they accent the one-shoulder purple shirt perfectly. Her light purple hair is tossed up in a high ponytail with her many braids accenting the sides. I could never pull off those colors, but she looks vibrant in them.
I’m leaning on the doorway, per my normal when I ask, “So what’s this little chit of the chat?”
“What all do you know?” Regan asks, squinting her eyes to peer at me, or at least something about me.
“Like my ABC’s? The names of the states? What year is it? What are you asking me?” I ask, clutching my cold coffee like a shield in its little cup advertising in a scrolling font, ‘Hexy Witch’.
Regan rolls her eyes and I don’t have to hear her sigh to know she sighed.
“Hocus pocus shit, Harper. She wants to know what you know about all of this,” GiGi answers, still wearing her murder face and gesturing around her.
For a moment, I consider telling her about the house. I could tell her about the wood floor we had to reseal after GiGi over watered one of the hanging plants or maybe about the fourth stair going up which always screams with its wooden angst just to continue the game, but mostly, just to be the impressive pain in the ass I am. I don’t want to admit I really know nothing about all this hocus pocus shit, as we have termed it.
“I know the basics,” I sullenly admit, taking a sip of cold coffee, which I also won’t admit to doing.
“The basics being?” Regan pries, squinting her eyes again.
“Oh, tits and ticks!” GiGi exclaims, slamming her mug down on the side table near her. “She knows what she needs to know!”
“Do I?” I ask, just barely brave enough to look over my cup towards her.
I watch as GiGi moves her jaw back and forth with unsaid words and heavy thoughts.
“Jo,” Regan coaxes, “she needs to know. The power she used this afternoon will be felt by many others. I felt it and I’m small time. They will come to see who she is, what she is, and she needs to be ready.”
GiGi waves her hands with defeat. “Fine. Tell her. Tell her all of it.”
“I feel like I should be sitting for this,” I say, making my way further into the room with a bit of hesitation and touch of passive aggressiveness.
“Do you know what it means to be born of blood and death?” Regan asks, jumping right into it and ignoring my attempt to avoid it.
“Isn’t everyone born of blood?” I ask her with my deflection of sarcasm.
“That’s not the same, but yes, I suppose,” Regan is tiling her head and looking to be reading something off the ceiling’s paint. “Born of blood and death means your mother died while giving birth to you but was brought back before you were separated from her.”
I look to GiGi who has become fascinated by one of the long vines of the plant she’s petting. Feeling my stare, she answers, “Your mother’s heart gave out during the cesarean, but they were able to restart it before the cord was cut. You were born of blood, as in cut from her body, and from death, since she technically died for a second or two there before being brought back.”
“You were connected to both worlds, Harper,” Regan says, jumping on the explain train. “That connection carries now. You’re not just a necromancer. I know plenty of necromancers, or mediums, or such. You are something more. You don’t just talk to the dead or see the dead or even work with them. You can literally command them, control them to do whatever you want. Should you want.”
“And why does that make me such a threat?” I ask her, doing my best to not sound interested.
“Because over half of the power houses are the dead. Vampires. Demons. Demons in humans. Which means even Angels since they were never ‘alive’. They are animated by magic. Magic you can tap into and control. You could enslave almost all the top houses.”
I listen to Regan and I feel as if I’m watching the old cartoon with the teacher of sounds and not words. How can I, unicorn wearing, still jumping into bed so the monster under it doesn’t grab my foot, be a threat to powers such as theirs?
“You could walk right now into Da Luna Dela and shut the whole place down since it’s run off the dead witches who once lived and worked there,” Regan says with a tint of awe.
GiGi, still petting her plant, tells me, “The spa. That’s the name of the spa.”
“Oh,” is all I have to form. I keep sipping the cold coffee like it’s just going to randomly be warm with my brain drowning in the words Regan keeps offering. “This collector? Who is she?”
Regan squirms. “No one I know really knows. Every witch knows about her, or should, at least. She’s our boogeyman . She’s who parents threaten to call when we abuse our powers. I don’t know of anyone who has ever met her or even dreamed of her.”
“Then why should I be afraid of her if there’s no proof of her?” I ask with sincerity.
“Because that’s the point. Whoever she collects, just vanishes. They are gone from memory and script. Sometimes you’ll find a blank line in a coven’s book where a name should have been, but no one can remember the name. Mostly because no one I know can awaken a whole army of dead wolves, or pull the magic from them back into themselves, or can jedi mind fuck an Original demon.”
“Why do you call him that?” These are the questions I want answered. These are the facts I need. I’m stumbling pretty well along on the magic part, but the whos, and the whats, that’s what I want to know.
“Jedrek, as he now calls himself, fell with Lucifer in the great war. He was right there when it all went down making him one of the firsts, an original. Other demons are promoted from death by deeds done since their death. They can jump meat suits or linger around to make your life hell, but they can be handled even by strong-willed mortals. Originals always have a plan when topside and witches are taught to avoid them at all costs. Jedrek makes sure we are reminded of it. For a while, I was taught, his main job was to keep witches sorted and accounted.”
“Why?”
Regan shrugs, “No one knows, and if you ask him, he just says because he was told to. Not shocked to see him now since Johanna caused all this.”
“What is it that I need to know?”
GiGi huffs with my question as if in
sulted. “Everyone thinks you need to take some crash course in your life history and trigger your powers. If I did as they suggested, you would have been walking around with hormones and dead dates. I felt it best to teach you just enough to understand why you feel the way you do but not enough to fully open the doors, per se.”
“Now my doors should be wide open?” I lift an eyebrow with my question.
“Your doors need to be cracked, at least,” Regan suggests. “You have powers you don’t even know about, things you can do which will scare you. If you can’t control them, you’ll lose control and hurt someone.”
“Like my mother did?” I ask, breathing into the room the topic which is banned.
“What did your mother do?” Regan is almost leaning off the couch with curiosity.
“We don’t talk about that!” GiGi shouts. “There’s no need to talk about any of that!”
“If there’s a history of it in the family…” Regan trials her words like a smoke-filled warning before the flames show from a fire.
“Then I could lose control, too? Is what you’re suggesting?” I dare her to admit.
“You made an Original rip his own face off because you were tired of his smirk, Harper.”
“That’s fair.” I nod, and out of habit sip another bitter taste of the cursed coffee.
Regan waits, looking from me to the pouting GiGi, thinking one of us will surely speak up soon. I know GiGi won’t. She has buried that day so deep, I’m not sure if she even remembers it all. Her denial over what my mother did, and then what I did, is thick. I was wearing blue the day the cops dropped me on her doorstep after having so many other doors slammed upon my arrival. We own very little that is blue. If it is, it’s nowhere near the same shade of my arrival.
“She got angry at my dad. Killed them both when she lost control of her anger and magic. Not much to tell,” I tell the waiting Regan.
GiGi glances my way, knowing there is much more to tell. Like how my mother killed my father. Or how she killed herself. Or even maybe what I did to both of them when I came home from school and found them. There is, in fact, plenty to tell, but I won’t. Some scars are better left unexamined.
The Little Lies (The Great Hexpectations Series Book 1) Page 19