Something Wicked (5 page)

“How was your driving record until this last week?” I asked, instead. Just because I’d cursed him a week ago didn’t mean anything, right?

“It was great,” admitted Ben. “I can’t imagine what my insurance rates are going to do now. Why?”

Well, hell.

I had to talk to my grandmother.

The witch.

“W
hat do you mean, it’s not the real grail?” Victor Fisher pushed back in his chair so suddenly that the nearest guard glanced through the reinforced, Plexiglas divider that created a soundproof wall. “Do you have any idea of the hell I’ve been through for that damned thing?”

His attorney, a man who’d already known Victor well enough to recommend him to several local candidates in recent elections, could probably guess. Victor had arrived at their latest consultation with a black eye and a swollen lip. He’d limped to the table they now shared. His jail khakis were no longer creased, and his shirt sported its own bloodstain. Still, Sherman Prescott hadn’t become the best criminal defense attorney in Chicago by feeling sorry for clients. “You undertook that quest on your own, Fisher. Not because any of us requested it.”

“Only because you never recognized me as one of you. But I am! By blood, and by temperament. You admitted as much when I said I have the Hekate Cup.”

Prescott’s smile was plastic. “But as it turns out, you don’t. We had it analyzed. The chalice you…acquired…is barely a hundred years old. It’s nothing. You got yourself arrested for nothing.”

Victor leaned onto the table, his gaze sharp. “It’s not my fault. I had no way of knowing that it wasn’t the right cup, that the sister would come home. I wanted—”

But apparently he was still smart enough to shut up when Prescott raised one silencing hand. “However, despite those disappointments, you’ve at least impressed us with your perception. My colleagues and I like to believe that our society’s existence is all but invisible. But you not only found us, you identified individual members and gathered enough information to deduce our goals, never once tipping your hand until this particular…complication. If you hadn’t thought you really had the grail, I doubt you would have given yourself away even now.”

Victor’s chin came up. “I didn’t mean to kill her.”

“And let me guess. You feel terrible about it?”

“No.” At his lawyer’s look of surprise, Victor added, “It was her fault. If she’d just let me have the damned cup….”

A smile spread across Prescott’s face. “This is why we have decided to support you through this unfortunate situation, Fisher. You understand the true use of power. Given a second chance, do you believe you could find a real goddess grail? Not just some New Ager’s altar dressing, but an actual cup of ancient power?”

“Of course I can.”

Prescott waited, clearly intrigued.

“I’ve found an actual witch of ancient power,” explained Victor bitterly—and touched his swollen lip. “And I sure as hell owe her payback.”

“Hekate is a dark goddess,” warned my grandmother Trillo, her parchment skin nearly translucent in the candlelight. Her aged, accented voice wavered like the water in the black scrying bowl she held. But her half-sung words held a strength beyond volume—the strength of a priestess. “She is the powerful Queen of the Night. It is She who stands at the threshold between life and death. She is not to be called lightly.”

Lightly? I could remember every word of my curse.
I wish you a lonely, empty, suffering life in which nobody loves you and everything you care about shrivels and dies….

“Don’t worry, Nonna. ‘Lightly’ isn’t a problem.”

We were in the parlor of Nonna’s apartment, her blinds drawn firmly against outside light and prying eyes. She’d draped an embroidered altar cloth across her coffee table, with magical tools arranged on it—green candles, a censer, an athame, a beautiful old cypress wand from her homeland in Tuscany…and the bowl she now held.

A bowl black as night, filled with melted snow. It was in this that she looked beyond our world to someplace else, maybe to the will of Hekate herself.

To do this, Nonna stood very still.

I did not. It was my job to move, to walk with slow spins, clockwise, around her. It’s not as strange as it sounds. A lot of traditional dances move in circles, for long-forgotten reasons. Even kids sense the rightness of it, from “Ring around the Rosie” to “Duck, Duck, Goose.”

Movement raises energy. And circles within circles hold triple power. I was weaving myself into and out of the scent of incense and candle wax and something more—the tingle of magic in the air. Trancelike, I didn’t even have to turn on my own. The growing magic turned me.

“The Goddess,” Nonna continued softly, “is not ours to be summoned or ordered about. We are Hers. You especially,
cara,
are Hers.” She meant because both sides of my family worshipped Hekate—and because of my name. Kate isn’t short for Kathryn. “You called out to Her in your time of greatest need, and She answered.”

“I think She…” But here was no place to doubt why the door had flown open as I spoke my curse, or why Victor Fisher had fled. Yes, it
could
have been coincidence. But I knew it wasn’t. “The Lady saved my life.”

Nonna’s focus remained on the scrying bowl and on whatever she saw reflected in it. It sent a fluid mask of light across her aged, timeless face. “Would you have spoken the curse had you known the price?”

I would have sold my soul to bring justice down on the bastard. Still would.

But would I have sold someone else’s?

Her sharp gaze lifted to mine. Her penciled-in eyebrows arched questioningly.

“I used the wrong name,” I reminded her.

She nodded. “Half the name you spoke was correct. It bound the curse to the killer as well.” To judge by the newspaper articles I’d collected since last night’s accident, she spoke the truth.
Victor Fisher Attacked in Jail. Lawyers Request Solitary Confinement for Witch Killer’s Safety.

I’d read each article, and I’d thought,
Good.
But…

“But what about his brother?” I whispered.

Her tsk-tsk sound wasn’t hopeful. “Can you unthrow a handful of rocks because one of them struck an innocent?”

The answer to that was probably
no.
Damn it. “There has to be something you can do to fix it. Please.”

Nonna shook her head. “This is not for me to change,
cara.
It is yours, and Hers. For this, you will have to ask Hekate yourself.”

“Like…pray to her?” Could it be that easy?

“Write your request.”

When she handed me a small piece of parchment and a silver pen, I considered, then wrote,
Help me make this right.

Meanwhile, Nonna studied the water. Some witches can see visions in anything that puts off reflections—mirrors, crystal balls and black bowls of liquid. Eventually, she uncorked a vial on her altar and poured a clear liquid into the water. I barely noticed that it smelled alcoholic until she took my request, folded the paper into a triangle, lit it from a green taper candle and, once it had half burned away, dropped it into her scrying bowl.

Whoosh! A ring of blue flame danced, eerie and elflike, across the water’s surface.

“No.”
Nonna stared into the magic fire. “There must be a way. Ah, yes.” Magic was about willpower. To know, to will, to…
something
—I always forget that ingredient—and to stay silent. When Nonna looked up at me, her old eyes shone with the blue fire. “A pilgrimage. You must find Her source. Only then can you right your wrongs and fulfill your destiny.”

Okay. I suspected there was more, but one crisis at a time. “So where’s Her source?”

“Where She is most remembered. Where She was once worshipped. I think perhaps the old world…” The flame had quickly burnt out, leaving only water and a curl of ashy paper. Nonna drew a cloth of black silk over the bowl. “Never have I sensed so strong a calling, child. You have much to do.”

“The old—you mean Italy?
Greece?
I can’t! We’ve got the funeral, and then there’s all the court stuff.” The preliminary hearing was scheduled for the next week.

I’d already made arrangements to cut my hours and take night shifts until Victor was imprisoned for good, hopefully for life, hopefully with abusive cellmates. Was I supposed to leave the country, on top of all that? Sorry, Queen of the Night, but
no.

“I’ve got to be there for Diana.”

“Give me your hands,” commanded Nonna.

When you grow up in a family of witches, you don’t argue things like that. She laid her old, worn hands palm up on the altar cloth. I put mine in hers, the cast one, too. Her fingers embraced me.

Outside, those same noisy dogs howled.

“It is time you resume your training,
cara.
It is time you let Her speak to you, and not through me.”

“But Ben Fisher—”

“It was your curse. Only you—or She—can deflect it.”

My stomach knotted, but I felt the truth through my fingertips. “You mean I should train as a witch.”

“You say She saved your life.” Nonna released my hands with a final, comforting pat.

I nodded. Dark or not, deathly or not, that much felt too true. “Yes, Nonna. She did.”

“Then your life is Hers.”

I took a deep, shaky breath full of incense and candle-wax—and magic. Time to get that
vesica piscis
pendant out of my drawer.

As long as Victor Fisher’s life was Hers as well, it was a deal I could live with.

The next week felt unreal for so many reasons. For one thing, I found a toad in my house. Twice. In February.

The medical examiner released Diana’s body. It seemed like half of Chicago showed up for her burial alongside our parents’ graves, but not all of them were there to express sympathy. The crowd trampled the snow to mud, and her true friends seemed lost among them. Diana’s funeral had become an event, not about her life so much as her sensational murder.

Like I didn’t have enough reasons to hate Victor Fisher.

Valentine’s Day passed, barely noticed. I went back to work—part-time, at an inpatient facility instead of driving to my patients—and the normalcy of wage-earning felt like a betrayal of Diana. It wasn’t. I was on automatic pilot, doing the old fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. My job also drew me deeper into that “threshold between life and death” that Nonna had mentioned as one of Hekate’s realms. Hospice work had never been about saving lives, after all. My patients were already dying. My job, which I’d been drawn to after watching my mom go through YaYa’s lingering death, was about making them comfortable, keeping them company and being there for their loved ones after they passed.

And yeah, that part also felt weird now. The blind leading the blind.

Nonna began training me in magic. Intensely. I was surprised by the déjà vu, by how much my mother must have already taught me in my early childhood—the importance of candle colors, of moon phases, of rhyme. I knew more than I’d remembered I did.

I received a package from my second cousin Eleni in Greece—or maybe she was my first cousin once removed? Her grandmother had been my YaYa’s sister. The package included a blue glass disk with a golden eye painted on it, and the note simply said, “Perhaps this can help.”

Strange. But YaYa had hung a similar disk in her front window when she was alive, so I did, too.

Finally, I got my cousin Fran, Ray’s sister, to help me look up everything possible about the Fishers on her computer.

I didn’t like what I found.

For one thing, they were orphans, too. But instead of an accident, like the one that had claimed my mom and dad, Ben and Victor had lost their parents in a home invasion. The actual newspaper reports about the stabbing deaths gave me chills. The twins had been six. The killers had never been brought to justice.

For another thing, Al Barker hadn’t lied. Victor had a
much
better reputation than Ben did. Victor had gone to Yale. He’d worked at Prescott & Sons, one of the leading law offices in the city, before expanding into political consultation. His old firm proclaimed his innocence and offered a reward for information implicating the
real
killer. Victor had a wealthy girlfriend, who now stuck to her story of having withheld a valid alibi until she realized the weight of the charges.

In contrast, Ben Fisher had no degrees. And he was self-employed, studying conspiracies, secret societies and the occult.

By the day the preliminary hearing started, exactly ten business days since Diana’s murder, I was half doubting my own sanity. What if Ben
was
the killer? What if
Victor
really was the innocent victim?

Then I saw them together. Victor stood by the defendant’s table. Ben waited in the gallery immediately behind him with an older couple, probably the grandparents who’d taken them in after their parents’ deaths. The immediate resemblance between the two brothers was remarkable.
Identical.
But Victor had a fresh shave, his hair had been gelled neatly back and he wore a three-piece suit; the whole dog and pony show for the hearing.

Ben’s attempt at formality meant khakis instead of jeans and a brown corduroy blazer over his maroon T-shirt. His hair still flopped in easy curls over his forehead, curls he occasionally pushed back with one impatient hand.

I couldn’t see auras. But if there’s one thing magic teaches, it’s that there’s a definite reality beyond what we can see and hear. And whether I could name the source of my certainty or not, I could see the innocence in Ben and the through-and-through evil in Victor as clearly as if each of them radiated neon signs.

Ben’s eyes brightened when he spotted me, and he started to smile, then turned back to his grandparents with one last, sidelong glance.

I saw him touch his brother’s shoulder, saw Victor flash Ben his charismatic grin—and saw Ben give his brother a bracing squeeze before removing his hand.
They really were a pair,
whether Ben had helped that stupid drunk driver the other week or not.

I felt sick all over again. I hoped everything went quickly. This hearing, choosing the jury, the trial, the sentencing. I needed closure. I needed to see Victor Fisher convicted.

Then the lawyers got started.

As Mr. Jennings, the prosecuting attorney, had explained it, a preliminary hearing exists to try out the charges against the accused. It’s a lot like a trial but with two big differences. One is that there’s no jury; the judge alone makes the decision. The other is that, instead of finding guilt, the judge only has to find that there’s enough evidence to warrant the case going to a full trial. Clearly, in a case like Diana’s, this was just a formality.