Witch & Curse (16 page)

She lay back down, not totally convinced. Her heart was thundering. Then Bast nestled against her side and purred. Holly pet the cat, her own eyes wide open, trying very hard to process what had just happened.

She became aware of a new smell in the room, something feral and dirty. There was a tang of blood in the dark air.

Muzzily, Holly flicked on the lamp, blinking in the yellow light.

Then a fresh cry tore out of her throat.

On the floor beside the bed lay a huge dead rat. It was a deep, shiny black; blood still trickled from a gash in its side.

“Oh, my God,” she said, gasping.

Purring more loudly, Bast kneaded Holly's thigh and gazed up at her as if to say,
And I'd kill a thousand more for you
.

Just say the word
.

SEVEN

STORM MOON

Winter storms fiercely blow
Bury in ice our every foe
Give Deveraux strength for the days ahead
Lean and strong and freshly bled

Goddess come and fill our dreams
In sleeping nothing is as seems
Show Witch the path you'd have us take
Grant us Sight for Cahorses' sake

Jer, Eddie, and Kialish took Kialish's Saturn to the woody inlet where his father lived alone. Kialish's mother had died when he was very little; perhaps that's what had created the bond between him and Jer, that they both had lost their mothers at a very early age. As always, Eddie accompanied Kialish; they had been lovers for three years.

They were the best friends Jer could have wished for.

Kialish's father was named Dan; he had grown up in
a time when the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest worked hard at “becoming Americans.” Assimilation had been the name of their game, and to hell with cultural diversity. Not that anyone had known what cultural diversity was back then. There was being Caucasian, and then there was wanting to be Caucasian.

Dan lived in a beautiful wooden cabin he and other members of his clan—the Raven Clan—had built by hand. The small but clean two-bedroom house was warmed by a cast-iron wood-burning stove. He slept on a feather bed in a loft overlooking the living room, and built onto the back of the house, he had put in a redwood hot tub and an enclosed cedar box of a sweat lodge that reminded Jer of a sauna.

When the three guys got to Dan's, Jer presented Dan with a fat salmon he had caught and dressed himself, and received and gave the ritual blessing:
Good spirits infuse all you say and do and are
.

Wiccans would say,
Blessed be
.

Warlocks would say,
May the God aid your battles
.

Jer had been studying with Dan since he'd turned thirteen, which was when Dan had judged him old enough for the “Raven's Journey,” as he called it. He told Jer that his own Deveraux totem was not Raven, but Falcon, and that that bird was important to Jer's family history.

“You are an old soul,” Dan had also told him. “And your soul has unfinished business, in this world and the next.”

Jer had listened hard to that soul, but in the passing years, he had not heard word one from it. Now, with the two visions, the name Isabeau, and the certainty that his father wanted someone—a woman—in Seattle dead, he decided that finally, his soul was speaking to him.

After Dan had put the salmon away, he drew ritual symbols in black body paint on his, Jer's, and the other guys' chests and foreheads. Kialish and he wore ravens. Eddie's totem was the salmon. Jer's chest was coated with a black falcon.

Then they had stripped down to loincloths and entered the sweat lodge, which was a room big enough to house at most five people. Dan had already laid and set the fire in a square metal brazier set into the wooden floor. Alderwood smoke wafted toward the wooden ceiling of the small, cube-shaped room.

After inhaling the ritual smoke, Dan passed a peace pipe to Jer, filled with pungent botanicals designed to send them more quickly and deeply into their spirit journeys.

Jer hesitated and looked at the others. Only he would take a journey; the others were there to witness it.

As usual, his friends were there for him.

Kialish held out his hand; they shook. Then Eddie did the same, before he settled against Kialish. Dan put his hands on both Jer's shoulders.

“You aren't sure about this,” he said to Jer, “are you, my lodge son?”

Jer shook his head. Eddie and Kialish began to stoke the fire to encourage more smoke into the room. After a minute or two, their foreheads and backs rolled with sweat. Jer was sweating, too. Rivulets of perspiration trailed down his chest, smearing the large, taloned and beaked falcon Dan had drawn there.

“I need to know what my father and Eli are doing,” he admitted, “but I don't want to know.”

Dan nodded. “You want to remain uninvolved, passive, ignorant.”

Though Dan spoke the words in a neutral tone, each one felt like a judgment that found Jer wanting.

Yes
, he wanted to say.
I don't want to be a warlock. I don't want to have powers
.

But the truth is, I do. And I can't pretend that something isn't happening
.

“I
have
to know,” he told Dan. He turned to Eddie and Kialish. “Help me, my lodge brothers.”

As always, the two gave him the signal that they were willing, a simple thumbs-up—a modern anachronism
in the ritual-laden, old-fashioned world of Dan's sweat lodge.

I don't know why they like me so much
, he thought honestly. Dan had spoken a lot about his air of authority, and the force of his powers, but Jer knew that that was not why Kialish and Eddie usually deferred to him as point man in their day-to-day lives. For some reason, they were drawn to him, found in him the qualities that they cherished in friends.

He inhaled the pipe smoke.

At once the botanicals hit him; he was reeling; careening, flying high above the air, circling and diving and screeching—

I am Fantasme
, he thought.
I am the Falcon
.

As he flew into the arched stone window of the castle, he saw a man pacing. His back was to Fantasme, and he was dressed in a long robe of crimson with green moons and stars emblazoned on it; he wore a pointed hat, and his hands were clenched.

“I cannot do it,” he muttered. “I cannot kill her. I haven't gotten a son in her, but that's the Cahorses' doing. I can surmount their spells. If I get her with child, my family will not touch her.”

And then the door opened and another, older man stood in the doorway, glowering.

“You know it has to be done,” he said sternly.
“They will not let her bear your child until you have given them the secret of the Black Fire. And that you—we—will never do. That secret is a Deveraux secret.”

The younger man . . .
Jean, his name is Jean
. . . glared at
Laurent, his father
. . . and said, “Then why did we commit to this alliance? Why did you marry her to me?”

“It was a gamble,” Laurent admitted. “We will not share the secret of the Black Fire with a Cahors. But we will, with the son of a Deveraux and a Cahors. But apparently, that is not good enough for them.” He sniffed. “They want to have the secret now, not in a generation.”

“And so, she must die,” Jean said bitterly.

“If you don't do it, I will,” Laurent concurred. “And you, having feelings for her, will be far more merciful than I.” He huffed and balled his fists. “I was won over to the idea of this marriage by others of the Circle. The moment Isabeau was born, the idea of the alliance was born as well.”

Jean was taken aback. “I . . . I didn't know that,” he admitted. “I thought you were the primary strategist for my marriage to her.”

“Not in the beginning. And I regret my weakness. They'll surely try to retaliate after she is dead.”

Jean said, “Surely they suspect what we plan to do?”

“Surely,” said Laurent. “And that is why the saying goes, ‘He who hesitates is lost.'”

He pointed to the elaborately carved box on a wooden stand. In it lay Jean's athame, which Laurent had helped him to make. “Kill her swiftly, and do it soon.”

He stood at the doorway, and Jean made a stiff, angry bow. Then he turned around and crossed to the box.

His face was
. . .

. . . mine
, Jer thought, reeling.
We could be twins
. . . .

And on the broad, strong wings of Fantasme, Jer flew out of the castle window, screeching and wheeling, crying out for Pandion, to warn her of her mistress's danger. . . .

Flying swiftly, flying swiftly . . .

“Kill her swiftly . . . ,”
Jer said in a flat voice as the others listened.
“Kill her swiftly. . . .”

He blinked, shaking hard as his spirit fell back into his body. Dan, Eddie, and Kialish had moved forward, listening hard, and Dan grabbed his wrist as Jer collapsed and fell forward, exhausted.

“Sleep now,” he instructed. “Your lodge brothers and I will talk. When you wake up, we'll listen to your story.”

Jer's head sank forward; he was aware that someone was extinguishing the smoke, and someone else was helping him lie on the wooden floor. Gentle hands put a pillow beneath his head and covered him with a blanket. A sprig of fresh rosemary was placed on his pillow, to help him remember his spirit journey.

He slept there all night.

Tomorrow was the first day of school in Seattle, and Holly would be there.

Her aunt had helped her register, brought her to the new student orientation, picked her up again. Holly had gone through the motions, walked in a daze behind the senior who had taken her and the other new kids on a tour of the school. She couldn't have told any of the Andersons a thing about it, because she honestly didn't remember a moment.

Amanda was beyond happy about Holly's staying. She finally had an ally in the house. And they could both complain about the lack of Jer to each other.

Neither of them had seen him since that night at The Half Caff. Nicole went out with Eli all the time, and she talked about seeing Jer, but Jer didn't say
anything about their bizarre encounter, at least not that Nicole shared. Amanda told Holly it was a waste of time to ask her sister about Eli's brother; she was way defensive about seeing Eli and she never took questions about the Deveraux men with any sort of grace.

But Holly couldn't stop thinking about it; so much had already happened to her with Deveraux men, directly or indirectly. So on the night before school started, she dared to ask, “Was Jer there?”

Nicole snorted. “Are you two still clinging to hope? He
has
a girlfriend, you know. A grad student.”

Amanda raised her brows and lifted her nose in the air, as if she were smelling something bad. “I'm surprised Eli doesn't burst into flames when he steps on the high school grounds. He hated it enough.”

Nicole rotated her head, one of the many “acting exercises” she continually performed around the house. She would be in a special drama class this year, which was all she talked about anymore. Holly knew more about Nicole's schedule than her own.

“He has his high school equivalency.”

“Jer
graduated
,” Amanda told Holly. “He was in the honor society.”

Nicole rolled her eyes.

“What about college?” Holly asked her, trying to
deflect the conversation further away from Jer. “Is Eli going?”

“He doesn't need it. He reads a lot.” Nicole yawned. “I guess you don't know that the Deveraux are really rich.” She moved her shoulders. “Really, really rich.”

“Oh.” Holly hadn't known.

“From their mom,” Amanda said. “Their mom who
disappeared
.”

“Oh, God, Amanda, don't start
that
up again,” Nicole snapped. She gestured dismissively and said to Holly, “The whole thing was investigated. Sasha Deveraux walked out on their dad when Eli was five. It was this big thing all over town when we were little.”

“She never contacted her own children,” Amanda added. “She just went away.”

Poor Jer
, Holly thought, imagining herself abandoned as a child of three. Losing her parents when she was seventeen was bad enough.
And no wonder his brother's so out of control, with that father of theirs. She probably got tired of him cheating on her
. . . .

“That is so not true,” Nicole insisted. “She checks in all the time. Eli told me.”

Amanda shook her head but remained silent. There was an awkward moment; the tension grew, and both sisters looked at Holly. She had no idea
what they expected from her, but she had understood for some time that they had put her in the middle of their rivalry. She had also understood that that had been a role she'd played at home, for her mom and dad. Had their marriage gotten rocky as she'd gotten older and spent less time with them? What would have happened if they'd survived until she'd gone away to college?