Something Wicked (7 page)

It clicked, then, and I finished, “‘End.’”

“Yes!” Maggi seemed awfully pleased.

It had been a clapping game that Diana and I would play as small children, like “Pat-a-Cake” or “Miss Mary Mack.”
Circle, circle, never an end.

I said the next line as I’d known it, “‘Cup-cup-cauldron—’”

“‘—Ever a friend.’ You
do
know it!”

“You’re pretty excited about a nursery rhyme.” I led her into the kitchen to put a pot on the stove. “Would you like coffee or tea? I have decaf.”

“Tea, thanks. And…it’s not just a nursery rhyme. Katie, what I’m going to tell you may sound strange.”

“I’m a witch.” I think that was the first time I’d spoken those words out loud. They kind of shivered through me. I really was, wasn’t I? “I think I can handle strange.”

“Did your mother or grandmother ever tell you a bedtime story about a queen and her daughters?” Maggi settled herself into Diana’s chair, either by accident or instinct. I didn’t mind.

Instead, I considered her question, and I remembered my mother’s near-forgotten voice.
Once upon a time, there lived a great queen who had thirteen beautiful daughters.
“She sends her daughters away, right? And she gives them something….”

Whoa.
I’d just remembered the rest.

My gaze met Maggi’s. She nodded, encouraging.

“Cups,” I finished, pretty sure this was no coincidence.
“Pour your powers into these cups,” the queen instructed. “Share them all you want. But if you end up in danger, or if people plot against you, hide the cups so your powers will be protected.”

“First nursery rhymes,” I challenged, “and now fairy tales? What is it with cups? Who
are
you?”

“I’m a professor of comparative mythology in Connecticut,” she admitted, which made me and my community college nursing degree feel a little inadequate. “And I’m a Grail Keeper. I think your sister was, and you are, too.”

I just waited, because—I mean, really. A
what?

“It’s my belief,” Maggi continued, “the belief of many scholars, that goddess worship was once the norm, long ago. That was a good time for women, apparently for most people. But as patriarchal rulers and religions took over, the goddess culture slowly had to go underground. They hid their most sacred objects—their grails—to protect them until it was safe, until it was time for them to reemerge. In order to keep the locations secret, they passed the information on to their daughters in a form that most men wouldn’t find the least bit interesting. Mainly because women have always been in charge of children.”

“Nursery rhymes.” I got it. “And bedtime stories.”

Maggi nodded. “If you know the rhyme, and/or know the bedtime story, and/or wear a chalice-well pendant—”

I must have looked confused, because she indicated her necklace. The
vesica piscis.
I nodded.

“—then you may be descended from some branch of these priestesses. I think there may be hundreds of them.”

“So you think that the cup Victor Fisher stole from Diana is…some kind of grail? Like the Holy Grail?”

“
A
holy grail, in any case.” Here, Maggi frowned. Up until now she’d had a kind of confidence to her; I wasn’t surprised that she was a college teacher, she seemed to know so much. But she also seemed to dislike
not
knowing things. “There’s no way to be sure, except to drink from it. But in the last year, a secret society of powerful men have begun seeking out and destroying goddess grails.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupted. It all made a great story, and watching Maggi Stuart tell it, I could believe too easily. But…“A secret society?”

“Businessmen. Politicians. Telecommunications magnates. They already destroyed the Kali Cup, in India. And they went after my ancestral grail, the Melusine Chalice. This Fisher—he’s in politics, huh? Attended Yale Law? Rubs elbows with VIPs?”

Okay, so that made me suspicious. “How do you know all this?”

“The Internet. I subscribe to a service that searches for different word pairings. Anytime a news story comes out that combines goddesses and cups, I’m sent a notice. He is, isn’t he? One of those big power-broker types?”

I nodded and, reminded of my sheer hatred for Victor Fisher, scowled. I had to leave for work in about an hour. It didn’t leave a lot of time for calling all the powers of darkness down on his head. “Not for long, if I have anything to say about it.”

“Then he fits the profile of the old Comitatus. The secret society,” she explained. “They’ve realized the power of these grails, maybe because it’s time for the goddess’s power to return, and they want to stop it. If your sister’s cup was a true grail, it’s a direct line of communication to your goddess.”

“Hekate,” I whispered.

“One of the most powerful goddesses there is,” Maggi agreed. “Which means that if Her cup is kept safe, and its power joins with that of other goddess grails, their combined force could improve the situation of women a hundredfold. I have reason to think it’s time. But if it’s destroyed…”

Then—women’s rights might go backward? It was a lot to swallow, especially since I’d never felt sexism was that big a problem anymore. But it was even more to dismiss out of hand.

“That’s what I came to tell you,” Maggi Stuart explained. “That if it was a goddess grail Fisher took, he took more than a repository of your family’s power for generations back.”

“No,” I agreed. “He took Diana, too.”

Maggi nodded. She really seemed to understand how that was the worst. But she wasn’t going to linger there.

“But the cup, you might be able to get back.”

T
he Fisher family used to say that Victor had good days and bad days. Their grandparents, in particular, preferred to focus on the good days and pretend the bad ones didn’t exist.

Today was apparently one of them. “Come on, Benny,” Vic insisted, scooping up the keys to his BMW. “The party won’t be the same without you.”

Ben, who’d hung back for the whole visit, just stared at his brother. Then his grandmother said, “That’s a lovely idea. It’s so good to see you two doing things together again.” Ben turned the same shocked, silent gaze on her.

Victor rolled his eyes. “It’s not like we’re celebrating that poor woman’s death, Benny! Just that her family wasn’t able to pin those ridiculous charges on us.”

Their grandfather snorted at the idea of anyone thinking such evil about either of his grandsons, as if they truly were identical.

Hurt crept into Victor’s dark eyes at his brother’s continued silence. “My God. You believe it? You believe that I’m capable of—God! Never mind. Forget I asked.”

Shaking his head, he backed toward the foyer.

Ben gave up on silence. “Why
wouldn’t
I believe it, Vic? She picked you out of a lineup.”

“Benjamin!” exclaimed his grandmother. Of course.

Vic waved back her outrage. “What, Kate Trillo? She picked
you
out of a lineup first. And her sister wrote
your
name in blood at the crime scene. But do I think you committed the murder, or even that you and Kate conspired to frame me? No. And do you know why? Because you’re my brother. Because I know you. I thought you knew me, too, but…”

He shook his head, scowling, just a little…hurt.

It was a great act.

His grandmother put her hand on his arm. “Ben doesn’t mean it. He’s just confused. Tell him you’re just confused, Ben.”

“
I’m
not the one who’s confused.”

Victor gave their grandmother a loud, blatantly affectionate kiss and grinned, to show he was fine. “Look, walk me to the door at least, okay? I need to ask you something.”

With a last, questioning glance at the grandparents who had raised them, Ben headed out with his brother. Only after they were alone did he ask, “Why would she lie?”

“Why would
I
lie?”

“Because that’s what you do!”
Despite keeping his voice low, Ben’s words shook with intensity. “I don’t know why. I wish I did. But this wouldn’t be the first time you claimed to be me.”

“What, you mean when we were kids? Years ago!”

Ben shook his head. “When you were caught shoplifting. When you trashed Gran’s car. When you slept with Amanda. When you—”

“I’ve explained all that. More than once. What else can I do? And if you want to believe some grief-stricken witness from a whacked-out family over your own brother? Fine. Be that way, Benny. Excuse me for wanting to make sure you’re okay.”

Ben barked out a laugh. “That
I’m
okay?”

“It wasn’t
my
name written in blood at the murder scene. I’m not the expert you are, but doesn’t your name in blood mean the witch cursed you or something before she died? Or let me guess. You don’t believe in curses.”

Ben refused to answer.

“I guess it doesn’t matter anyway,” Victor continued, shrugging into his expensive coat. “Even if it were real. The witch is dead now, so her curse is dead, right? That’s how it works, isn’t it? I mean, if curses work at all. Once a witch dies, her spells die with her?”

Ben’s gaze raked his brother’s face, speculative, before he deliberately answered, “Not…always.”

Victor’s eyebrows rose. “No?”

“No. If the curse required sustained focus, then sure—the death of the magic user ends that focus. But if Diana Trillo wrote the name as she died, then the energy of her death might linger, continue to feed it.”

“Wait. Now that she’s dead, there’s no way to break the damned curse?” Victor laughed, clapped a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Should I be worried about you, here?”

Ben shrugged off his touch. “Even if it was a curse, I’m pretty confident it wasn’t aimed at me.”

“But why the hell take chances? What are you going to do about this? How do you protect yourself?”

Ben studied him for a long, tense moment, before turning away. “Let me worry about that.”

But behind him, Victor’s narrowing gaze indicated otherwise.

“Well…”
Diana spread her arms to indicate the scope of what Maggi Sanger-Stuart had told me that afternoon.
“
That
was unexpected.”

The really odd part was that I’d begun to “dream” her—to imagine her?—without even being asleep. If I was doing something quiet, like now, it felt like I was really listening to her. Despite that she’d never followed me around work before.

A lot of hospice care is provided in the patient’s home, but since my hand was still cast—now in lighter fiberglass—and I’d cut my hours for the trial, I was working at a nine-room, inpatient facility called the Crossroads. The stately building had once been a private residence, before its donation to an area hospital for the purpose of “palliative care.” That means making incurable patients comfortable as they die. It was an elegant and surprisingly peaceful place, for all its sadness. Graveyard shift was doubly so.

I was mainly there to keep an eye on things and to put people at ease. Making rounds, I checked in on Mr. King, who was in the end stages of lung cancer. His divorced daughter had two jobs and three children, so he’d come here to die.

“I mean, really,”
insisted Diana, trailing me. Chatting around patients would probably seem more insensitive if she, too, weren’t dead.
“Who would’ve thought we had a
destiny?
”

Mr. King’s breath was ragged, despite his oxygen mask, but otherwise he seemed as comfortable as possible. I looked around the floor until I found the toy dog his daughter had given him to stand in for his real dog, which she sometimes brought to visit. I tucked the toy under his bruised, aged hand. He sighed with what seemed like satisfaction, and his hand closed slightly around the fake fur of the plush guardian.

“Watch over him,” I whispered to the toy. Many witches believe inanimate objects can hold guardian spirits. I couldn’t help but feel like the real dog could somehow be with his master through the toy.

And if that was possible, why couldn’t a goddess store power in a goblet used in her worship?

I said to Diana, in my head,
You could have mentioned all this while you were still alive.

“What, you think I knew? Hello! If I had any idea that we were part of a long line of Grail Keepers, with a divine mission to help restore womanly power, I think I would have mentioned it.”

“How could you not know?” I asked her, charting Mr. King’s numbers before moving on to check Miss Parkhurst. “You’re the superwitch.”

“Okay, one? I know you’ve only been back in training for a couple of weeks, but you know darned well magic isn’t a free ride. It’s a way of…”
Diana extended her hand as if to grab some invisible prize.
“Of reaching beyond the ordinary to access hidden energies. Like with Mr. King’s dog back there, and how he sleeps better with it. And two? Listen to me this time. You were always the superwitch of this family, not me. I did okay, but you…”
Her expression softened with what looked like pride.
“It’s good to see you back in the game.”

Miss Parkhurst moaned. I blinked, and the image of Diana’s soft, proud expression faded back into fantasy. No surprise that I was obsessing over what Maggi had told me that afternoon. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder if it was some kind of snow job. Sure, I believe in magic, but goddess grails? Secret societies? The chance to restore female power?

Frankly, I’d never felt particularly
dis
empowered—not from being female. Despite being short. Grrrl power, and all that.

Still, if this grail thing was true…

I petted Miss Parkhurst’s remaining hair back from her sunken face, and her moaning softened. Since I’d already looked in on the others, I pulled a chair closer to the bed, sat and held her frail hand with my good one. Her eyes didn’t open, but her lips curved faintly.

Maybe that had been the most shocking thing about Diana’s death. People tend to come into hospice care with a life expectancy of less than six months. But death rarely comes as quickly as you’d think, and life tends to put up a damned good fight, even when everyone involved wishes it would give up and let go. For Diana’s young life to have been ended with one blow of a hammer…

It was unnatural. And it said something terrible about Victor Fisher’s powers of destruction.

If that grail stuff is even
true, I thought.
Maggi seems smart and all, but I just met her. If I knew someone who might understand all this, someone I already trusted….

But…there
was
someone else. Someone who would know better than anyone if Victor Fisher was in a secret society. Someone I trusted more than made sense—unless you counted our magical bond. It was a crazy idea, but knowing him had already set a killer free. Shouldn’t some good come out of it, too?

What if I asked Ben?
I thought to Diana. She didn’t say anything, being dead and all. But the idea felt…right.
Ben.

If that Grail Keeper stuff is true,
I thought to Diana,
then Ben Fisher may know. This sort of thing is right up his alley. I’ll ask him to meet us for lunch tomorrow. I’ll have a better idea where I stand on all this, then.

I spent most of the night making Miss Parkhurst comfortable as her diseased heart finally gave out. Toward the end, she kept trying to lift a hand as if reaching out toward something. She nodded. Then she just…stopped.

Outside her window, in the Illinois winter, an owl hooted, low and poignant. Me and Hekate.

Guardians of Death.

Ben nodded when he caught sight of me waving him over to my and Maggi’s table. He headed in our direction.

“Are you sure we should even be meeting?” he asked, looking suspicious. “After the allegations Vic’s attorney made….”

“They were bullshit allegations,” I said. “I have no intention of giving that asshole any more power over me than he already took. What about you?”

His dark eyebrows lifted—and I didn’t blame him. My attitude would have surprised me, too, the afternoon before. But…calling down the powers of darkness would still make for a legitimate Plan B.

With an approving nod, Ben sat. Then he noticed Maggi.

“Magdalene Sanger-Stuart,” I said. “This is Ben Fisher. He’s…” Hell, what was he? “He’s the good twin. Ben, this is my friend Maggi Stuart. She teaches—”

He lit up. “Comparative Mythology at Clemens College? My God, what an honor. I just received an advance copy of
The Faerie Goddess in Early Gaul
to review for the site.”

“That’s more my aunt’s work than mine,” said Maggi modestly, while I stared. She was a writer, too? Of
books?

“I doubt that, especially the English translation. Your theories relating feminine divinity to an appreciation of the everyday sacred is inspiring. And yet it makes so much sense!”

And to think, I’d warned Maggi he might be quiet.

“Thank you. Katie tells me that you’re one of the creators of the
Superrational Show?
”

“My partner Al’s the spokesperson,” Ben insisted. “I just do the research.”

“If you’re reading
Faerie Goddess,
that’s some pretty deep research,” Maggi agreed.

Our waiter showed up to interrupt the lovefest. Maggi and I had chosen a Greek restaurant for our meeting with Ben. She said Greece was a great place for goddesses. A man at a synthesizer played some strange, plodding music, and the walls were painted as if pieces of brick had fallen away to reveal a sunny island landscape.

Then Maggi leaned forward—as much as she could over her protruding belly. “So, Ben, what do you know about the Holy Grail?”

And they were off, talking about “illusory quests for perfection” and “sacred bloodlines,” and referring to places and authors I’d never heard of. We’d ordered our lunch and eaten half our appetizer before I got up the nerve to ask, “But what about goddess cups?”

I’m not sure what bothered me more—that Ben looked as surprised as he was impressed for a minute? Or that both expressions quickly faded into suspicion and maybe…hurt? “You think I’ve been after goddess cups, too?”

Surprised, I shook my head. I didn’t like that jolt of connection I felt as he studied my face, like he was maybe too smart for comfort, so instead I asked, “What kind of knives killed your parents?”

Maggi choked on her water.

Ben’s gaze narrowed, and he tried his word twice before forming it.
“What?”

“We think your parents might have been killed by a secret society,” I explained. “A society that wants the goddess cups. Maggi told me that they use knives in their attacks.”

“With people they respect, anyway,” Maggie added.

That had explained her carrying the cane, which had turned out to be a sheathed sword. As I’d suspected already, she also had a female bodyguard with her, a competent black woman now seated at another table.
For my husband’s peace of mind,
she’d explained.
Until the baby comes.

“And you…” Ben shook his head as if to clear it. “That is…
What?
”

“Then I remembered reading that your parents were stabbed, and…” Damn. I really had turned evil, hadn’t I? Or at least insensitive.

These were his
parents
I was talking about!

“That’s what I read,” I said weakly. “Anyway.”

At least I managed to stop talking. Maybe Maggi
should
take over, here. If she’d just stop wasting time.

“We’ve started at the end,” she said tactfully. “I’m sorry for ambushing you. It must be a painful subject.”