09 - Return Of The Witch (26 page)

Chapter 23

I convinced Carlos and Dominic to let Ursula and me
call on Paige Turner by ourselves. I felt that showing up at her door with two police detectives would only arouse suspicions after what happened at Suffolk’s Walk. As it was, our entire visit had me sitting on the edge of my seat with worry that Paige could sense the true reason we were there. I’m sure through subtle body language and
bit intonations in my speech, she picked up that something was amiss.

We showed up at
her door about half an hour after leaving Carlos’ place. Paige escorted us to her parlor, and after shooing the cats off the sofa, offered us a seat.

I looked at Ursula and caught her staring up at the ceiling. The witch’s circle and pentagram were gone.
So were the candles, yet the outline of it all remained. If Paige had wished to remove circumstantial evidence linking her and Gypsy through her witch’s key, she most certainly failed.

“Tell me, Lilith of
New Castle,” she said, after the two of us settled into the thick cushions of her couch. “Tell me why you are here.”

I manufactured a look of concerned perplexity, hoping she’d buy it.
“We need your advice.”

“Do you
now?” She seemed pleased by that.

I knew if she and Gypsy were co-conspirators, then she already knew about Ursula possessing the quintessential. In that matter, I had nothing to lose.

“Yes. You see there’s been a major development regarding the prophecy. It’s come to light recently that—”

“Oh, so now
thou doth believe in the prophecy?”

“Well…of course. Now that
we know Ursula possesses the quintessential.”

“She what?”

I wanted to reach across the room, bitch-slap the old broad upside the head and tell her to crank it down a notch. Her acting was that bad. I looked again at Ursula, who maintained a most sincere face. I only hoped she could keep it together enough for the two of us.

“
Yes. That’s why we’re here,” I explained. “We recently learned that my mother, whom I thought was dead, but is actually still alive, killed the four guardians just like the prophecy predicted, and now she wants to kill me…, or rather, her.” I jacked my thumb up at Ursula “She nearly killed us earlier today out at Suffolk’s Walk.”

Paige Turner eased back in her porter’s chair and
thumbed the ball of her cane with her gnarly fingers. “Interesting.”

“
If you say so. The thing is, my mother stole the essence from those women and now she’ll stop at nothing to fulfill the prophecy by stealing the quintessential from Ursula. We have to stop her. To do that, we need to know her strengths and her weaknesses. We come to you because we’re hoping the Demdike Grimoire might have the answers.”

She nodded slowly and
cracked a crooked grin. “Her weakness is thy strength.”

“I know. That’s why I’m asking
for your help.”

“No, I mean what makes her weak is the very thing that makes
thee strong.” She looked at Ursula. “Or should I say makes
you
strong, dearie.”

“
The quintessential?” asked Ursula.

“
Aye. Doth thou know how to use thy newfound powers?”

“Well, I am not so—”

“Not so bad with them, is what she means,” I said. “She knows how to use her powers. Just this morning she tore an entire building in two. Didn’t you, Urs?”

“
Aye, but I did not—”

“That’s
right. Don’t be modest.” I said to Paige, “Please. You were saying?”

Paige
leveled her eyes at me and sighed. “To kill Gypsy, Ursula must penetrate her defenses down to her soul.”

“
How does she do that?”

“
By unleashing the full power of the quintessential in a single blast.”

“You mean like, bam! All at once.”

“Precisely.” I watched Paige Turner loosen her grip on the ball of her cane. She held her hand out, palm facing us. “You will feel it welling up from deep inside. Let it boil. Feed its intensity with anger. Let your rage build until it erupts like a volcano.”

“Like a shockwave?” I asked.

She returned her hand to her cane and nodded. “Like a shockwave. Do this, and realize the prophecy of Elizabeth Southerns.”

“
Okay.” I slapped Ursula on the knee. “You got that, kiddo? Let it build. Rage. Anger. Yadda-yadda. Maybe throw in a little PMS for good luck, and then BAM! Let her have it.”

“
Bam?”

“No. BAM!
” I clapped my hands together hard. “Like you mean it.”

“BAM!”

I looked at Paige. “I think she’s got it.”

Paige smiled. “Go then.
Thy destiny awaits.”

“Thank you for your help.”

Ursula and I got up and started for the door. We were nearly there when I turned and said to Paige, “Oh, one more thing, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes?”

“How did you know her name?”

“Pardon?”

“Gypsy. I never mentioned that to you, yet you called her by name.”

She smiled, the way one often does when defeated but no longer care
s. “What matter is it now?”

I shook my head. “No
ne, I guess, but do me a favor, will you?”

“Yes?
”

“Next time you see
Gypsy, tell her we’ll be waiting for her under the old stone bridge tonight at six o`clock.”

She
turned her eyes toward the clock on the mantle, but said nothing. I shut the door behind me.

We called Carlos from the car and
learned that he had already gone to work. For that reason, he suggested we all meet at the Justice Center to discuss our next move. While there, I asked Dominic to do a background check on Paige Turner.

Ten minutes later, he rolled his chair over to Carlos’ workstation.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, dropping a few pages of computer documents on his desk.

“Believe what?”

“I’ve got nothing on her. The woman’s an enigma. No priors, no traffic tickets, no jury summons. She doesn’t own property. She’s never been sued; never sued anyone. Doesn’t have a social security number, passport or drivers license. Near as I can tell, Paige Turner doesn’t exist.”

“Man,” said Carlos.
“Some people will do anything to get out of jury duty.”

“
That’s not surprising,” I said.

“What?
That she wants to get out of jury duty?”

“No,
that she has no past. A witch that old, one that’s reinvented herself through so many rites of passage, doesn’t want to leave a trail of her existence.”

“I can believe that,
” said Dominic.

Carlos said,
“What I don’t understand is why, as old as she is, she hasn’t taken advantage of the last rite of passage cycle. From what you told me, her next opportunity won’t come for like ninety years.”

“That’s right.”

“Man, you think she looks old now.”

“Carlos, she’s not going to make it.
Don’t you get it? She apparently just wants to die.”

“Oh.
Well that’s kind of sad then, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, real
sad.” said Dominic. “Listen, forget that. Tell us what she said about Gypsy.”

Ursula
answered, “She told us how to kill her.”

“Did she? I wouldn’t have thought you’d get it out of her so easily.”

“We didn’t,” I said.

“But Ursula—”

“I know what Ursula said, but what Paige told us won’t kill Gypsy, but maybe that’s better.”

“I’m confused.”

“Me, too,” said Carlos. “How is not killing her better than killing her?”

“It’s not.”

“Ho-boy.”

“Listen.
When we went to Paige and asked her for help, we didn’t expect she’d tell us how to kill Gypsy. I hoped she’d tell us what Gypsy would want us to do, and that’s exactly what she did.”

Dominic said, “
Ah, so now you know what not to do.”

“
Exactly.”

“Okay, for the record,
” said Carlos, “that did nothing to clear up the confusion.”

“Carlos,
if we tried to kill Gypsy by doing what Paige told us to do, we’d be playing right into her hand.”

“
Is this about the quintessential?”

“
Of course, it’s all about the quintessential. See, there’s a reason Gypsy didn’t just come out and kill me as she did the others. I mean, let’s face it. She had plenty of opportunities. She knows where I live. She could have ambushed me anytime, turned herself into a shadow and zapped me with a vapor resonance wave. Out in the cow pasture, she could have turned herself into a tornado, picked up Detective Pierce’s car with all of us in it and dropped it from a hundred feet up.”

“What ab
out at the cannery this morning?” Carlos said. “She tried to drop a container on your head. If it wasn’t for Ursula, she’d have killed you then.”

“Yes
and she’d have been surprised and disappointed when it killed me.”

“Why? It’s what she aimed to do.”

“Carlos, she thought I possessed the quintessential. She assumed I would use that power to keep from getting crushed.”

“Wait,” said Dominic. “Are you suggesting that her efforts to kill you were actually meant to piss you off so
that you’d use the powers of quintessential against her?”

“
Yes.”

“But why?”

“Because I believe that’s how the final assimilation process works. You know, I remember hearing about this as a little girl. In fact, I think Gypsy’s the one that told me.”

“Wow
. How’s that for irony?”

“I know. So, i
t’s a built-in safety mechanism, this acquisition process. In earth’s nature, white witches, known as guardians, guard the prime essentials. It’s unfortunate that the laws of quasi-physics allow for the assimilation of those elements through vapor resonance, but they do. Such a violent process it is. The safety valve to this cosmic conundrum lies within the fifth element. For obvious reasons, it’s not kept on Earth, or even in this universe. It’s kept in another dimension.”

Carlos said, “It’s kept in the Eighth Sphere, right?”

“Yes. At least it was. As an additional safety measure, the fifth element cannot be taken by force from its guardian through vapor resonance or any other manner of violence. The guardian must give it away. And theoretically, she would only do that in the most extreme cases.”

Dominic asked,
“What do you mean, give it away?”

“I mean just that.
She simply gives it away. Oh, but to be sure, she cannot give it to just anyone, no-no. She can only pass it on to the Guardian Supreme, keeper of all four earthly prime essentials.”

“
I suppose that’s Gypsy.”

“That’s right
. Gypsy is now the Guardian Supreme, and once she accepts the fifth essential, she will hold the force of all nature in the palm of her hand. She will be master of all matter and energy, dark and light. She will know no limits to time or space, no boundaries to other dimensions. In short, if Gypsy gets her hands on the quintessential, the devil himself will have to ask her permission to use the toilet.”

“
To hell with it!” said Carlos. “We won’t give it to her. You said she can’t take it forcefully, right?”

“
True, but you see what she’s been trying to do? When she thought I had it, she tried to force my hand, launching attacks designed to scare me, infuriate me, make me use the power of the quintessential against her.”

“
But how would using it on her help her to get it?” asked Dominic.

“Because, using the power of the qu
intessential means expelling it. Gypsy’s no longer like other witches. The energy of the quintessential feeds the essence of the prime. All she has to do is trick Ursula into discharging even a little bit of that energy. If she can latch onto it, she can drain Ursula of virtually all of it, leaving her completely empty.”

“But she use
d it at the cannery.  Why didn’t Gypsy…” he held his hands up and did a little quote thing with his fingers, “latch onto it then?” Before I could answer he added, “And what do you mean completely empty?”

“Do you have a preference on the order I answer
?”

“Lilith, I’m only trying to understand. This doesn
’t just concern you anymore.”

I leaned back in
my chair and considered it. He was right. It concerned him, too, and most certainly, it concerned Ursula. “I’m sorry, Dom. Ursula having the quintessential caught everybody by surprise, and by everybody, I mean Gypsy as well. She didn’t have time to react and refocus her energy.”