Witch & Curse (2 page)

“Dude, what is
wrong
with them?” Tina asked in Holly's ear. “They're going to kill each other. Or us.”

“When we get home, adopt me,” Holly said miserably.

“We're almost old enough to get married.” Tina wagged her eyebrows suggestively. “C'mon, baby, you know you want me.” She blew Holly a kiss.

Smiling faintly, Holly sighed and shook her head. “Your mom would love that.”

“My mom is a bigger knee-jerk liberal than your whole family put together,” Tina retorted. “She'd love to plan our commitment ceremony,
darling
.”

Holly grinned and Tina grinned back. The smiles quickly faded, however, as the sound of angry voices rose once again over the rapids' roar.

“—
not
going back early,” Holly's father hissed.

“You never told me.” That was her mom. “You should have told me . . .”

Ay, Chihuahua
, Holly thought. Tension eddied between them, and a fresh wave of anxiety washed through her. Something was basically, fundamentally wrong, and if she got really honest with herself, she knew it had been wrong for over a year.

Ever since I had that nightmare
. . .

Her dad broke eye contact first and her mother
quit the field, two territorial animals both dissatisfied with the outcome of their face-off. They were both good-looking people even though they were in their forties. Dad was tall and lanky, with thick, unruly black hair and very dark brown eyes. Her mom was the odd one out, her hair so blond, it looked fake, her eyes a soft blue that reminded Holly of bridesmaid dresses. Everyone always thought they looked so good together, like TV parents. Few besides Holly knew that their conversations were more like dialogue from a horror movie.

“Okay, hang on,” Ryan interrupted her thoughts—and for a split second, the arguing. “We're gonna start the Hance Rapids. Remember, stay left.” He looked up at the lowering sky and muttered, “Damn.”

Holly cocked her head up at him. His face was dark and durable, much too leathery for someone who was only twenty-one.
By the time he's thirty
, she thought,
he's going to look like a statue made of beef jerky
.

“Gonna be a storm, huh,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the rapids and the creaking of the raft's rubber skin.

He glanced at her. “Yeah. We'll stop early tonight.” He glanced at her parents. “Tempers are getting kinda short.”

“They're not usually—” she began, then shut her
mouth, nodded, and got back to paddling.

White water tumbled ahead like a kettle put on to boil, and she and Tina sat up a little straighter, getting ready for the big, exciting zoom downward. Going down rapids was officially the fun part, the reason they were there. But Holly had had enough. She wanted to go home.

The river currents rushed, threading together and then separating, curling around rocks and boulders and making eddies like potholes in a street. They skidded and slid along, the by-now familiar blend of joy and fear tightening Holly's chest and tickling her spine. “Yee-ha!” she yelled, and Tina took up the cry. They broke into laughter, bellowing “Yee-ha!” over and over in voices loud enough to echo off the canyon walls. Canyon wrens joined in and thunder rumbled overhead, and Holly felt a flash of anger that her parents were too busy being pissed off at each other to share in the fun.

The raft picked up more speed, then more; Holly's stomach lurched and Tina shrieked with fearful delight.

Then the sky rumbled once, twice, and cracked open. Rain fell immediately, huge bucketfuls of it, completely drenching them. It rushed down so hard, it slapped Holly's shoulders painfully. She flailed for her
yellow raincoat wrapped around her waist, and the boat pitched and bowed as everyone lost track, startled by the downpour.

Ryan yelled, “To your oars!”

Holly's parents snapped to, guiding the boat the way Ryan had taught them. Rain came down like waterfalls; the river waters sluiced to either side of a giant boulder, and Holly remembered rather than heard Ryan's admonition to stay left of it.
Everything around here, stay left
.

The huge granite outcropping towered above them. Its face was jagged and sharp, not rounded with erosion as one would have expected.

“Wow,” Tina yelled, taking a moment to gesture at it.

The rain fell even harder, pummeling them, and Holly worked frantically to pull her hood back up over her head as a bracing wind whipped it off. The torrents blinded her. She couldn't see anything.

“Jesus Christ,
duck!
” Ryan screamed.

Holly ducked, peering through the rain.

There was a millisecond where everyone froze, shocked brains registering what was happening. Then they all scrambled as if responding to an air raid in a World War II movie, grabbing their paddles and fighting the river's determination to slam them en masse
against the huge piece of granite.

“No!”
Tina cried as her oar was almost torn from her hands by the force of a wave. She started screaming as the raft dove down at a 45-degree angle. Foaming angry water rushed over the five passengers up to their waists. Tina screamed again and batted futilely at the water as Holly shouted, “What do we do now? What are we supposed to do?”

“Keep calm!” Ryan bellowed. “Left, left,
left!
”

Holly's oar felt entirely too fragile and slight to make any difference in the trajectory the water was flinging them into; at the same time it was too heavy and unwieldy for her to manipulate.

Then her mother shouted something and Daniel Cathers cried,
“No!”

The river was a maelstrom now; everything was gray and cold and unforgiving and treacherous; gray stone and gray water, as the raft was propelled toward the boulder with the force of a catapult.

Holly held on to the paddle. It was useless now, but still she held it, hands frozen around it in terror. Someone, she had no idea who, was shouting her name.

Then Ryan's voice rang out. “Jump!
Now!
”

His command broke her stupefaction. As she tried to unbuckle her safety straps and jump, the river
crested over the raft, completely engulfing it. Cold, unforgiving water surrounded her, cresting above her shoulders, her head; she waited for it to recede, but it just kept barreling over her. She panicked, unable to breathe, and began pushing frantically at the restraints. She couldn't remember how to undo them.

I'm going to drown. I'm going to die
.

The steel waters thickened, becoming waves of blackness. She couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything, except the terrible cold. The raft could be tumbling end over end for all she knew. Her mind seized on the image of the huge face of rock; hitting it at this speed would be like falling out of a window and splatting on the street.

Her lungs were too full; after some passage of time she could not measure, they threatened to burst; she understood that she needed to exhale and draw in more oxygen. She fumbled at the belt but she still had no clue how to get free. As her chest throbbed she batted at the water, at her lap and shoulders where the straps were, trying so hard to keep it together, so hard.

I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die
.

The ability to reason vanished. She stopped thinking altogether, and instinct took over as she flapped weakly at the restraints, not recalling why she was doing it. She forgot that she had been in a raft with the
three people she loved most in the world. She forgot that she was a teenager named Holly and that she had hair and eyes and hands and feet.

She was nothing but gray inside and out. The world was a flat fog color and so were her images, thoughts, and emotions. Numb and empty, she drifted in a bottomless well of nothingness, flat-lining, ceasing. She couldn't say it was a pleasant place to be. She couldn't say it was anything.

Though she didn't really know it, she finally exhaled. Eagerly she sucked in brackish river water. It filled her lungs, and her eyes rolled back in her head as her death throes began.

Struggling, wriggling like a hooked fish, her body tried to cough, to expel the suffocating fluid. It was no use; she was as good as dead. Her eyes fluttered shut.

And then, through her lids, she saw the most exquisite shade of blue. It was the color of neon tetras, though she couldn't articulate that. It shimmered like some underwater grace note at the end of a movie; she neither reached toward it nor shrank from it, because her brain didn't register it. It didn't register anything. Oxygen-starved, it was very nearly dead.

The glow glittered, then coalesced. It became a figure, and had any part of Holly's brain still been taking in and processing data, it would have reported the
sight of a woman in a long-sleeved dress of gray wool and gold trimming, astonishingly beautiful, with curls of black hair mushrooming in the water. Her compassionate gaze was chestnut and ebony as she reached toward Holly.

Run. Flee, escape, don't stop to pack your belongings. Alors, she will perish if you do not go now. Maintenaint, a c'est moment la; vite, je vous en prie
. . . .

Nightmare
, Holly thought fuzzily.
Last year. Nightmare
. . . .

The figure raised forth her right hand; a leather glove was wrapped around her hand, and on it perched a large gray bird. She hefted the bird through the water, and it moved its wings through the rush torrent, toward Holly.

“We aren't witches!” her father shouted in her memory.

And her mother: “I know what I saw! I know what I saw in Holly's room!”

Go, take her from here; they will find her and kill her . . . je vous en prie . . . je vous en prie, Daniel de Cahors
. . . .

“Je vous en prie,”
the man in the deer's head whispered heartbreakingly.

It was Barley Moon, the time of harvest, and the forest was warm and giving, like a woman. The man
was staked to a copse of chestnut trees, his chest streaked with his own blood.

The Circle was drawn, the tallow candles set for lighting.

“I am so sorry for him, Maman,” Isabeau whispered to her mother. The lady of the manor was dressed in raven silks, silver threads chasing scarlet throughout, as were the others in the Circle—there were thirteen this night, including her newly widowed mother's new husband, who was her mother's dead husband's brother, named Robert, and the sacrifice, the quaking man in the dead deer's head, who knew that he would soon die.

The Circle's beautiful familiar, the hawk Pandion, jingled her bells as she observed from her perch, which had been fashioned from bones of the de Cahorses' bitterest enemy . . . the Deveraux. She was eager for the kill; she would snatch the man's soul as it escaped his body, and daintily nibble at its edges until others caught hold of it for their own purposes.

“It is a better death,” Catherine de Cahors insisted, smiling down on her child. She petted Isabeau's hair with one hand. In the other hand she held the bloody dagger. It was she who had carved the sigils into the man's chest. Her husband, Robert, had felt compelled to restrain her, reminding her that torture was not a
part of tonight's rite. It was to be a good, clean execution. “His wagging tongue would have sent him to the stake eventually. He would have burned, a horrible way to die. This way . . .”

They were interrupted by a figure wearing the silver and black livery of Cahors; he raced to the edge of the Circle and dropped to his knees directly before the masked and cloaked Robert.
Robert's height must have given him away
, Isabeau thought.

“The Deveraux . . . the fire,” the servant gasped. “They have managed it.”

Pandion threw back her head and shrieked in lamentation. The entire Circle looked at one another in shock from behind their animal masks. Several of them sank to their knees in despair.

Isabeau was chilled, within and without. The Deveraux had been searching for the secret of the Black Fire for centuries. Now that they had it… what would become of the Cahors? Of anyone who stood in the way of the Deveraux?

Isabeau's mother covered her heart with her arms and cried, “
Alors
, Notre Dame! Protect us this night, our Lady Goddess!”

“This is a dark night,” said one of the others. “A night rife with evil. The lowest, when it was to have
been a joyous Lammas, this man's ripe death adding to the Harvest bounty. . . .”

“We are undone,” a cloaked woman keened. “We are doomed.”

“Damn you for your cowardice,” Robert murmured in a low, dangerous voice. “We are not.”

He tore off his mask, grabbed the dagger from his wife, and walked calmly to the sacrifice. Without a moment's hesitation he yanked the man's head back by the hair and cut his throat. Blood spurted, covering those nearby while others darted forward to receive the blessing. Pandion swooped down from her perch, soaring into the gushing heat, the bells on her ankles clattering with eagerness.

Isabeau's mother urged her toward the man's body. “Take the blessing,” she told her daughter. “There is wild work ahead, and you must be prepared to do your part.”

Isabeau stumbled forward, shutting her eyes, glancing away. Her mother took her chin and firmly turned her face toward the stream of steaming, crimson liquid.

“Non, non,”
she protested as the blood ran into her mouth. She felt defiled, disgusted.

The gushing blood seemed to fill her vision. . . .