Dark Possession

by Carol Goodman

  “I’m going on break in five minutes,” Leon told us as he steamed the milk for my latte and served Frank an austere espresso. “Moondance should be here soon, but Tara called to say that she can’t make it.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Do you think she’s gone over to the other side?”

  “Might have.” Leon shook his head as he wiped down the brass fittings of the espresso machine. “Her husband lost his job and she’s expecting another kid. And her husband nominated two new members for the Lions Club who looked suspiciously nephilitic.”

  “You belong to the Lions Club?” I asked, more surprised at that than the possibility that the club had been infiltrated by nephilim. In his skinny black jeans, scruffy goatee, and black Converse high-tops, Leon hardly looked the Lions Club type.

  “I bought Fair Grounds when Dory Browne had to leave town this summer. It was either that or let it become a Star-bucks. Anyway, now that I’m a small-business owner, I thought I should join. The problem is …” He looked around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear, suspiciously eyeing an old man examining the chalkboard menu, and then leaned over the counter to whisper, “There were so many empty spots after the summer migration that there are a lot of new members. These two guys that Tara’s husband nominated just bought Browne’s Realty. They’ve got that tall Nordic look going on, and one of the first things they did was veto the town’s Halloween parade.”

  “But that’s a tradition!” I objected. Every year on the afternoon of Halloween, Main Street was closed to traffic and the stores gave out candy to trick-or-treaters. The elementary school organized a costume parade that ended in the town square, where apple cider and donuts were served.

  “I hear that Tara has also organized the town PTA to prohibit the elementary school parade. Haven’t you seen the buttons?”

  “Buttons?”

  Leon pointed his scraggly goatee toward a tall gray-haired woman. She was dressed in a long burgundy wool coat and a floppy crocheted hat decorated with a button of a jack-o’-lantern with a line drawn across it.

  When she caught me looking at her, she pursed her lips and shook her finger at me. “The new pastor at my church gave a most enlightening talk. Do you know that Halloween was originally a satanic mass and that the ancient druids sacrificed children on their bonfires? Here …” She dug into a large crocheted bag and handed me a printed pamphlet entitled “The Devil’s Night.” “That’ll tell you all you need to know. That’s all I’m giving if any children come to my door this year. I’ll have a nonfat decaf latte, young man, and make sure the milk is fresh.”

  Frank and I took our coffees to a table while Leon filled the woman’s order. As we waited, I noticed a few other people in the café wearing banned-jack-o’-lantern buttons. I was beginning to think the whole town had turned against Halloween when Moondance came in, wearing a black T-shirt proclaiming Blessed Samhain in orange lettering beneath a witch silhouetted against an enormous orange moon. Since Moondance was not a small woman, the moon loomed large as she approached us. I felt a moment’s trepidation. Moondance had been sharply critical of my inclusion in the witches’ circle this summer. I was an untrained novice whose erratic energy had thrown off the circle twice, and in the end I hadn’t been able to stop the door from closing. I was expecting at the very least a sharp-tongued drubbing, but instead I got a bone-crushing hug.

  “Thank the Goddess you haven’t gone over to the dark side!” Moondance held me out at arm’s length, hands gripped on either forearm, and gave me a shake. Her frizzy orange hair wafted around her head like dried chrysanthemum blooms, and her pale-blue eyes were glassy with unshed tears. “And you …” She let me go and turned to Frank. “I knew a Delmarco would never abandon the cause. Your grandmother would be proud of you.”

  “Yours, too, Moser,” Frank said, stepping into Moondance’s embrace and thumping her soundly on the back. “Glad to have you on our team.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not much of a team,” Leon said, handing Moondance an algae-colored shake as he sat down at our table. “Four is not enough for a circle.”

  “But we need a circle …” I looked around the café to make sure no one was listening, but all the other customers had left. Noticing that, as well, Leon nodded at Moondance.

  “Was that an aversion spell?” he asked.

  She nodded, her rust-hued hair bobbing cheerfully. “Home-burner spell. The citizens of Fairwick were all suddenly struck with an overwhelming conviction that they’d left something on the stove, forgot to turn off the gas, or didn’t leave water out for their cats. We should be able to talk in peace for half an hour. No time to waste, though. Tell me what you need the circle for.”

  I relayed to Leon and Moondance what Nan Stewart had told me about the hallow door.

  “Huh,” Leon said, stroking his goatee. “You are the door? How metaphysical.”

  “It’s also confusing,” I said. “I’m not sure how to ‘open myself,’ and she says I still need to do it on Halloween.”

  “That part makes sense,” Moondance said. “Samhain is the time of the year when the barriers between worlds, between living and dead, between seen and unseen, are thinnest. The hinge of the year, some Wiccans call it.”

  “A hinge on which a door may open,” Frank said. “Especially if we have a doorkeeper who’s made a blood bond to the door.”

  All three looked at me. “But I can’t do it on my own. Nan Stewart says I need a witches’ circle in the grove and a wider circle of observance in the village. Halloween, she said, is only as powerful as its observance.”

  “That’s why the nephilim are trying to shut it down,” Leon said. “They don’t want Callie to open the door.”

  “Which, I’d say, is reason enough to open it,” Moondance said, “but if we’re going to summon a circle, I’d like to be clear on why.” Her eyes, no longer cloudy with tears, now sharp as tacks, flicked to me. “So far I’ve heard a lot about the hallow door, Callie, but if you don’t mind me saying, how do we know it’s not just a way for you to get back together with your incubus boyfriend?”

  Frank made a sound that I knew was preparation to launch into my defense, but I held my hand up to stop him. “Fair question,” I said. I felt the blood rush to my face at the memory of my erotic dreams. They’d become more urgent as the nights lengthened toward Halloween, as if William Duffy knew he was running out of time. “Nan said that when her village in Scotland was invaded by the nephilim, the doorkeeper was able to use the angel stone to destroy them. And she says the angel stone is still in Ballydoon.” I didn’t mention that Nan had been a little vague on that point, but Moondance sensed my uncertainty and pounced.

  “So we’re all supposed to risk our lives on the gamble that you’ll find your way back to a seventeenth-century Scottish village and find this stone that might destroy the nephilim?”

  “Risk your lives? I’m not asking—”

  “You are,” Leon said. “The nephilim don’t want this door opened. They’ll try to stop you. The circle’s to protect you while you open the door, but the nephilim will try to break through it. If the circle breaks, we’ll be at their mercy. We’d need powerful, experienced witches, and I only see three of them here.”

  I began to object, but he stopped me. “You don’t count. You’ll be in the center of the circle. We need at least six to make a circle to protect you. Where are we going to find three seasoned witches by Halloween to risk their lives against the nephilim?”

  “Right here.”

  We all looked up, startled by the sound of a woman’s voice at the door. We hadn’t heard the door open—or the bell on it jangle—but a woman of average height stood silhouetted against the bright glare of sunlight coming in from the street. There were two more figures behind her. Another triad, I thought, which didn’t bode well, especially when the first woman stepped forward out of the glare and I recognized her as my grandmother.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “ADELAIDE,” I said, getting to m
y feet. I heard the scrape of chairs as Frank, Moondance, and Leon also got up. A crackling tension in the air raised the hair on the back of my neck. My three companions were marshaling their magical powers to stand against my grandmother. I didn’t blame them. To the uninitiated, my grandmother might appear to be a harmless Upper East Side matron, with her impeccably cut and dyed chin-length blue-black hair, her knit St. John suit, pearl choker, and no-nonsense handmade Swiss shoes, but anyone with an inkling of witchcraft could sense the power rising off her in waves. She was a venerable witch and leader of the Grove, an ancient federation of anti-fey witches who had joined with the nephilim to close the door to Faerie once and for all. Somehow, she must have gotten wind of our attempts to open the hallow door and had come to prevent it.

  Adelaide stepped forward and, sniffing the air, said, “Oh, my, I have a sudden urge to go home and check that I turned off the stove. What a quaint aversion spell! Yours?” she asked, looking straight at Moondance, who bristled like an angry cat under Adelaide’s regard. Adelaide lifted her right hand, her heavy gold charm bracelet gleaming in the sunlight. As a child, I’d been fascinated by her charms—the miniature gondola and cuckoo clock with tiny working parts. A miniature fan now winked in the sun as its blades began to move. Instantly I smelled singed copper, leaking gas, and heard the cry of a hundred thirsty house cats—Moondance’s spell amplified and turned on us. I was seized with a nameless dread that I’d forgotten something urgent. I stepped forward to push Adelaide aside so I could run home and … I didn’t know what. I just had to be home. Then Adelaide shook her charm bracelet and a pair of miniature scissors opened and snicked shut. The tension in the air snapped like a sprung rubber band, and my compulsion to go home evaporated.

  Adelaide smiled and tilted her head, as she did when I was little and I was expected to kiss her cheek. I felt the same pressure now but resisted it.

  “Darling, aren’t you going to invite your old grandmother in and get her a cup of tea? I hear you’ve been visiting the elderly lately.”

  So she’d heard of my visit to Nan Stewart.

  “I suppose your nephilim friends told you that. Did they send you here to punish me? Is that what you’ve become? A gofer for the nephilim?”

  I’d only meant to vent some of my anger at Adelaide. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, she had a knack for making me feel small and inferior. I knew now that part of her attitude toward me stemmed from shame at my father’s fey ancestry. Like many anti-fey witches, she believed that a union between witch and fey canceled out both powers. But that didn’t excuse the cold, loveless environment in which she’d raised me after my parents died—or her conspiring with the nephilim to destroy my town. I didn’t expect, though, to see those feelings of shame and smallness reflected in her own eyes.

  “I am not here at their bidding,” she said loudly. She lifted her hand to smooth her already immaculate hair, and I noticed that the fingers were bent and knotted. Her arthritis, which had been cured with Aelvesgold, was back.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked coldly. “Did they cut off your supply of Aelvesgold? Is that why you’re here? Well, you’re just going to have to use Motrin and Bengay. There’s no more Aelvesgold here.” That wasn’t entirely true. I knew that there was a whole lump of the stuff—an Aelvestone—in the headwaters of the Undine, but that was meant to nourish the undine eggs I’d moved there this summer, and I wasn’t about to tell anyone about that. “The nephilim have sucked all remaining traces of it out of Fairwick.”

  “Yes, they did to us, as well,” Adelaide said, her voice tremulous. I peered into her face. My grandmother had looked much the same from my earliest memories on, never seeming to age a bit, yet now her face was creased with a network of fine lines that looked like cracks in a dry desert. She looked as if all the moisture—and life—had been sucked out of the marrow of her bones.

  “To all of us,” one of the women behind her said, stepping forward. The voice, with its gravelly Australian accent, was familiar. It sounded like that of Jen Davies, a reporter I’d met last fall when she exposed my roommate Phoenix’s fraudulent memoir and who, I’d later learned, was a junior member of the Grove. But this couldn’t be Jen Davies. Jen, a Jivamukti yoga enthusiast and marathon runner, was a paragon of physical fitness. This woman was at least two inches shorter, stooped, and gray haired.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” the woman said with a self-deprecating laugh that turned into a cough. “What? You thought I got that ass just by doing yoga?”

  “Jen? What happened to you? To all—” My mouth dropped open as I saw the third person in the group. “Phoenix?” I asked incredulously. The last time I’d seen my former roommate, she was being sedated and dragged off to a mental hospital, shortly after Jen Davies had exposed her bestselling memoir as fraudulent.

  “I looked for you after you left the hospital,” I said, feeling guilty that I hadn’t tried harder. “But your mother wouldn’t tell me where you were. I was afraid …”

  “That I’d gone off on a bender?” Phoenix asked, smoothing back her abundant crinkly hair. She’d let it go completely gray—a pale platinum silver that somehow suited her. In fact, she looked remarkably well, especially in comparison with Adelaide and Jen—who, I noticed now, was leaning heavily on Phoenix’s arm. “Well, I did,” she said, answering her own question. “I was holed up in a hotel room in Hoboken until Jen found me and took me to this marvelous Grove retreat in—” At a glance from Jen, she closed her mouth, but only for half a second. “That’s right, I’m not supposed to say. It’s kind of a spa for witches who have gone through traumatic events. Jen got me in even though I’m not a witch. Your friends were right about that, by the way. I didn’t have an ounce of magic in me—at least not then—but that turned out to be a good thing when those monsters attacked.”

  “The nephilim attacked a Grove retreat?” I asked. “But why? I thought you were all in cahoots.”

  Jen laughed at the phrase, but the laugh turned into a hacking cough. “We’ll tell you all about it, but your grandmother’s right, you know?”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “You really ought to offer her—and all of us—some tea and”—she looked past me toward the counter—“some of those scrumptious-looking pumpkin muffins. I’m famished … and it’s a long story.”

  Phoenix insisted we all have a hot beverage before she began the story. She asked for a soy chai latte for Jen, and Earl Grey with milk and sugar for Adelaide. She had Frank move Adelaide’s chair three times to make sure she wasn’t seated in a draft, then settled a fluffy mohair shawl around my grandmother’s shoulders. Then Phoenix asked Leon if he could make her a hazelnut half-decaf latte with half skim, half whole milk and just a smidgen of whipped cream on top.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, winking at me. “That sounds like the order of a manic-depressive, doesn’t it?”

  “Well …” I hemmed and hawed. I was still too shocked at watching Phoenix tend to my imperious grandmother as if she were her own beloved granny—and at my grandmother for tolerating the treatment—to be thinking anything at all about Phoenix’s coffee order. But now that she mentioned it …

  She laughed. “I know! But, honestly, it was being bipolar that saved my life.”

  “And mine,” Jen said, laying a gaunt hand on Phoenix’s. “If you hadn’t been there when the nephilim attacked, I would have been killed.”

  “What happened?” Moondance asked.

  Phoenix opened her mouth to begin, but Adelaide laid a hand over hers and she instantly stopped. I’d never seen Phoenix so easily silenced.

  “I think I should tell it,” Adelaide said, in a heavy, throaty voice I’d never heard from her before. As she began, I realized that the unfamiliar tone was regret.

  “After we left Fairwick this summer, we repaired to the retreat. Closing the door was a monumental effort for us.” She glanced at me and blanched. “You underestimate your own strength, Callie. We had to fight your will to wor
k the closing spell.”

  “I thought it was the nephilim who closed the door,” I said, blinking away a tear at the memory of Bill’s blood pouring through my fingers, his mortality evidence of my love for him, which had come too late to save him.

  “The nephilim have no control over the door,” Adelaide replied. “That is their one weakness. When they were banished from Faerie, their fey magic was destroyed—except the Aelvesgold in their wings. The fey took pity on them and left them that, although some say it wasn’t pity but cruel irony that they would leave the nephilim with Aelvesgold but without the ability to use it. If they’d known how the nephilim would use their Aelvesgold, the fey would have done it differently. Since the time of the witch hunts, the nephilim have bribed witches to do their bidding with the promise of Aelvesgold. I’m afraid that we were foolish enough to succumb to their bribery.”

  “And what’s different now?” Moondance asked.

  “They betrayed us,” Adelaide answered. “When we left here, we went to a sanctuary to recoup our powers. The nephilim knew we were at our weakest. They attacked our compound and spread their narcotic incense throughout, rendering all our number unconscious. And then they began to devour us.”

  “Devour?” I heard Leon and Moondance repeat the word at the same time I did.

  “I don’t know what else to call it,” Adelaide said, her face white. “They spread their wings over their victims first. They have barbs beneath their feathers, thousands of tiny needle like barbs …” Adelaide shuddered, and Phoenix took up the story.