Witch & Curse Read online

  “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?

  “Losers,” Nicole said snottily. “Don’t even think of hanging out with me at school tomorrow.”

  After she flounced away, the conversation died, and Holly wandered down the hall to the guest room.

  She lay for hours, tears spilling onto her pillow. This was not how it was supposed to work out. Fresh grief broke through her first-day jitters like an open wound—My parents are dead; Barbara is still sick, and I’m here. I’m not supposed to be here. It was going to be Tina and me, and the best senior year there ever was. . . .

  It rained that night. It rained almost every night.

  It rains all the time in Seattle. How does anyone stand this?

  The new school year was beginning, the university first, and then the high schools . . . and Jer, Eddie, and Kialish were sophomores now. Kari was still working on her PhD, so she would be there too.

  Everything in Jer’s world began in the autumn, although it was the dying part of the God’s year. In the magical calendar, harvest was upon them, for which the Goddess took credit; and then, in the winter, the Year King would die, swallowed up by the darkness of night.

  As he stood on a hill overlooking the city, he saw glitter and sparkle—faery magic—so different from the darkness his father had taught him to worship.

  The summer had come and gone, and he had kept his distance from Holly Cathers, too weirded out to approach her again . . . but unable to stop trying to connect, at least indirectly. He had tried a lot of ways to find out more about Holly, including looking her up on the Net. He knew a few things: She was an orphan from San Francisco, she was going to inherit some good money, and she liked horses. There were a few other thing on a Web site she had begun with a friend of hers named Tina Davis-Chin, who had died in the same rafting accident as Holly’s parents. Her favorite color was green, and she was a July baby. A Leo.

  But who she really was, who in the other world, he still had no clue. He had tried every way he knew how, short of asking his father, had tried every way he could to reconnect with the latest vision—the one about death—from sweating in Dan’s lodge to casting
runes to spilling his own blood to the God Mercury. None of it had done any good. It was as if someone had thrown up a magical barrier to prevent him from discovering anything.

  Could it have been Holly Cathers herself? Is she a witch? Is she the “one” my dad was talking about killing? Because nothing has happened to her. So I’m thinking it’s got to be someone else. He had been checking the obituaries in the paper, but no one whose name he recognized had died. That didn’t mean much, but he took some comfort in it.

  “Child of the Lady, come to me,” he whispered to the glowing stone in his hand. “I will protect you.”

  As clouds scuttled the moon and dark birds cawed in the evergreens behind him on the cliff, the stone in his hand began to glitter and glow. A soft green light bathed the wound on his wrist, where he had implored Mercury to aid him.

  “I shall be the Lord to your Lady, and save you from harm.”

  The stone’s glow intensified, and Jer whispered encouragingly to it in ancient Hebrew. It was his preferred magical language, although as warlocks allied with the Supreme Coven, Hebrew was a less than welcome tongue, being too closely associated with the Christian Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

  But Jer spoke to the stone gently, urging it forth with words of heat and longing from the Bible’s Song of Solomon. If only the Christians knew the power in those words. . . .

  The stone bobbled in his palm, warming to his touch, the green glowing as brightly as a 100-watt bulb.

  “Yes, yes, my Lady,” he urged it like a lover.

  In the glow of the stone, images formed very fuzzily at first, then gradually undulated into focus as the stone surged with power. Jer saw his father and brother in the chamber in their house. Filmy clouds of gray and black surrounded them, portents of evildoing to come. Jer couldn’t hear them—his stone was not that strong—but his alarm rose as he watched his brother walk out of sight, then return holding aloft a hand of glory—a dead man’s hand, the shriveled fingertips burning like the tapers on a candelabra. His father, robed and hooded in sorcerer’s attire, raised his left hand high; in it he held his own athame, made by his own hand, and passed the blade through each flame.

  They glided slowly to the altar where Jer himself had participated in the sacrificing of many small animals and birds. It was an ancient slab of carved stone featuring satyrs and centaurs and, in the center, a deep hollow for catching the blood of sacrifices. Other, smaller indentations were for burning incense, herbs, and sacred woods, the bowl shapes incised millennia before to align with the stars. The wonder was, that even though the altar had been moved hundreds of times in its existence, it still illustrated the annual starscape of the Seattle sky with uncanny precision.

  At the top of the altar, presiding over all the dark deeds done in his name, sat an onyx figure of the Horned God. His head was that of a goat, twin curled horns spiraling to either side of crescent-shaped eyes set with rubies. Below the goat’s fringed beard, the fanned hood of a cobra served as a neck. The torso belonged to a jaguar, and the front legs and paws to some unnamed beast of prey with talons fully half as long as its entire body. Its hind legs and tail were that of a crocodile.

  This was the image of the profane Lord of the Deveraux Coven, upon whom all their magical influence rested. Even seeing his statue made Jer’s blood chill. In their tradition, the Horned God was a real being, and he was not to be crossed, ever.

  In a wooden cage fluttered four anxious hunting hawks. They were tonight’s sacrifice, he knew. He took a breath, hoping that only the four birds were slated to be given up to the God. He would not be a witness to cruelty past that, and yet, he had vowed to stop the barbarism of his family if it came to killing a human being. He had to know what they were doing in the chamber without him.

  Jer was practicing the ancient art of scrying. The bird’s-eye view he had of his father and brother came courtesy of the ancient Middle Eastern conjuring stone he’d bought in one of the stalls at Pike’s Fish Market earlier in the day. The fish market, a favorite tourist hangout, also sold souvenirs and unusual tchotchkes. The short, gray-haired woman in the Birkenstocks who’d sold the stone to Jer had presented it as an interesting bead to use in jewelry; she’d owned one of those hippie-dippy throwback stalls, not knowing she held potent magic in her hand when she slipped the stone into a paper bag for Jer.

  A gentle wind flapped at the edge of his coat. The trees rustled and the lights below twinkled. Jer was becoming restive; all the objects his family had handled in their ritual thus far were standard to any Rite of Darkness. They must mean to commit no major mischief tonight.

  Maybe I’ll go see what Kari’s up to, he thought.

  And then what he saw made his gorge rise.

  “No,” he murmured aloud. “Don’t do it.”

  He was so shocked that he looked away and took a deep breath. His hands began trembling so badly, he nearly dropped the stone, which would spell disaster. Not only would it be damaged beyond repair, but his brother and father would be alerted to his presence, however remote.

  Removing a white linen shroud with a flourish, Michael Deveraux presented to the Horned God a fresh corpse. In life, she had been a lovely young girl. She had been stolen from a morgue, her white-blue skin evidence that she had lain in an icy drawer for some time.

  They meant to invoke a death curse, then. Tonight. Now.

  Who is it? Who are you trying to kill?

  Suddenly his father looked up, scowling. He waved a hand.

  The scrying stone in Jer’s hand went dark.

  Numb, Jer stood on the cliff, eyes unfocused. The lights below, an illusion. What he had seen, the only terrible reality he knew.

  My father sensed someone spying on him, he realized. Does he know it was me?

  The stone, devoid of heat, sat lifeless in his palm. He spoke to it, whispering words of encouragement, of assurance, of love. But the scrying stone was dead. His father had taken its essence from it with the merest gesture, like someone batting a fly.

  Above, the stars peered down, so many heartless eyes gazing down on the follies of man, uncaring. All his life, Jer had been taught that no supernatural being interfered in the travails of humanity unless called to do so. The only way to interest the God or one of his many manifestations in one’s situation was to make an offering. The Goddess was something else entirely. She did not walk with the warlocks of the Deveraux. She never had, and she never would. Any warlock of the Supreme Coven who dared to cross her would be struck by lightning, his ashes devoured by time.

  Or so Dad said. And he’s a lying murderer, Jer thought. Can I turn to Her?

  He reeled, wishing he were down in the city of Seattle, walking among the blissfully ignorant, just a regular guy.

  Down among the dead men, he thought ironically, quoting one of Sir William’s favorite English folk songs. He thought back to when he had been thirteen and presented at the Court of the Supreme Coven. He remembered the enormous gargoyles, the blazing fire rings, the huge columns and vast expanses of black-and-white marble floors. His father’s pride. Even Eli had been respectful.

  He saw himself cloaked in the rich, black velvet robe, the circlet of hawthorn leaves rested on his head; in his right hand, the footed staff, in his left, the magic wand said to have come down from Merlin, Dark Lord of the Ancient High Days . . .

  . . . and maybe I could change things, move us a little closer to the light. I’d have the authority. If I got to the Throne, I’d have to have a lot of backing, warlocks who wanted to do things my way. . . .

  He felt ambition singing in his blood. His heart was pumping hard. His fingers were literally itching, eager to hold the symbols of the highest office in all Coventry.

  Below him, the lights of the mundane world, the daily grind of simple men and women living lives of quiet desperation. Dying of boredom, wishing that fairy tales were true, gorging themselves on alcohol and food because their lives were, at the core, unendurable. . . .

  Warlocks never lived like that. The
irs was a life of many worlds, untold dimensions, of seeking, grasping, taking. . . .

  Jer’s dark soul took flight at the possibilities open to him as a Deveraux and an adept.

  The birds cawed more loudly now, their rasping song mocking his weakness. I know that my father and brother are planning to kill a human being—and that they have done it before—but even now, I can’t repudiate the Art. I can’t walk away, pretend I’m not a Deveraux, become one of the mundanes. . . .

  He balled his fists in his coat, dropping the stone into his pocket, and stared at the dizzying depth below him. He could step off, end it. His soul was spoken for; at least he could take a shortcut, get there faster. . . .

  Why was I born a Deveraux?

  Why was I born?

  But even then he was weak; he couldn’t kill himself any more easily than he could have helped his family kill another person. Furious with himself, he turned on his heel and headed for the Mustang, parked a short distance away.

  It was then that the birds flew higher, allowing other noises to creep into the night: the croaking of frogs, the scrape of crickets and tree branches . . .

  . . . and the frantic honking of a horn, accompanied by the panther roar of an engine in overdrive, as a black Mercedes bulleted around a curve and flew straight for him.

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Marie-Claire screamed as she came to.

  She had fallen asleep on her way home from the motel, and now her car was out of control. As her headlights bounced off the trees and the road and the stars, careening around her in a dervish, she grabbed at the wheel and slammed her foot on the brake.

  The squeal of her tires was earsplitting; the car spun into a 360. I’m going to die, she thought as she rode it out. Part of her mind was completely rational. I’ll look hideous. Closed coffin . . .

  From somewhere in the dim recesses of her memory, she remembered her driver’s ed class. Take your foot off the brake, she ordered herself. But she was paralyzed with fear; she could do nothing but stare straight ahead as the car wheeled around like an overwound music box.