Witch & Curse Read online

“What did you do?” Amanda asked. “What was that?”

  Nicole gave them another of her stealthy grins and pointed out the windshield. “Look!”

  Following the direction of her finger, Holly and Amanda stared out the window. At first they saw nothing in the low light, then the ground itself began jerking. Not too much, and not everywhere—just a spot over here, a circle beneath the bushes over there, a vague spot next to the walkway. All in all, about a dozen areas of quivering soil.

  “What’s going on?” Holly asked. “What—”

  “Oh, gross,” Amanda said suddenly. “Nicole, this is disgusting.”

  “But useful,” Nicole responded without missing a beat.

  Closest to the car, at the edge of the street where they’d parked rather than pulled into the driveway, a half-decomposed rabbit was dragging itself out of a widening hole in the ground at the base of a tree. As they watched, more and more little animals, sad and dead, struggled up from their graves—a sparrow with a maimed wing, a rotting frog, a tiny, baby squirrel that hadn’t survived its adolescence. And within seconds the noxious black shadows were flowing down the side of the house and covering the reanimated animal corpses.

  “Nowhere is it written that spirit suckers have to use a human as a carrier,” Nicole said blandly. “Or even that a carrier has to be alive. They just go for the first moving thing. They can’t control their carrier, and once they attach themselves, they’re stuck, either until their carrier dies or they find their target.” She shrugged, but it was clear she was pleased with herself.

  “These little wild things aren’t likely to go marching into Tommy’s house—even dead, their instincts’ll tell them to run and hide. And the spell will send them back to their graves at dawn.”

  “Wow,” Holly said, suitably impressed. “That’s excellent.”

  “Thanks,” Nicole said. “Come on—let’s go get our boy.”

  They climbed out of the car, instinct insisting they still remain cautious and quiet. Tiny figures shrouded in cloaks of deeper black were dragging themselves off into the night, and the roof of Tommy’s house looked clear in the wan moonlight shining intermittently through the clouds.

  But only a few feet away from the porch, Amanda froze. “Oh, my God,” she muttered. “Nicole, look.”

  Nicole jerked around and peered at the yard, trying to see what had spooked her sister so badly. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Sailor Bunny.” Amanda’s voice was filled with horror. “Oh Nicole, what are we going to do?”

  “Sailor Bunny?” Holly lifted up on her toes, searching the darkness, but she didn’t see anyone. “Who’s Sailor Bunny?”

  Nicole grabbed her wrist and yanked on it, hard. “Come on—we’ve got to get Tommy to open the door and let us in before Sailor Bunny gets to the porch. Before Tommy sees him!”

  Holly’s head jerked as she was hauled up on the porch after her cousins. “But who—”

  “Not who, what,” Amanda said grimly. She raised a fist and began hammering on the front door. “Tommy, it’s me, Amanda. Let us in, quickly! Tommy, come on!”

  The panic in Amanda’s tone made the hair raise on the back of Holly’s neck. “What do you mean ‘what’?”

  “Sailor Bunny was Tommy’s cat,” Nicole told her in a tight voice. “He died a couple of months ago. I never thought about it, but I guess Tommy buried him in the wildflower patch at the side of the house.”

  “Tommy, come on!” Amanda was practically screaming now. “Open the damned door!”

  Something scraped dully along the concrete where the bottom step of the porch met the walkway. Amanda’s throat convulsed, and she strained to see in the darkness below, even though she didn’t want to. “So that means—”

  “Sailor Bunny will want to come home,” Nicole said flatly.

  Light suddenly flooded the porch, filling their vision and temporarily blinding them. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys!” Tension leaked from Tommy’s words. “Sorry I took so long—”

  They didn’t let him finish. Amanda shoved him back inside and Nicole and Holly were right behind her, twisting and slamming the door shut just as something heavy thumped against it.

  Tommy staggered, then righted himself, bewildered. On the other side of the door, a steady scratching began, punctuated every few seconds by a faint, cracked sound that was half hiss, half mewl. “Wait—what is that? That sounds like . . . like . . .”

  Amanda sighed and sent her sister a hard look. “Tommy, we have a whole bunch of things to tell you all at once. But . . . um, do you have a shovel?”

  In Kari’s apartment, Jer’s coven was floating.

  Glowing, too, shot through with light as was every other item—from the couch, to the lamps set here and there, to the smallest knickknack or picture frame on a side table. Each item in the room seemed to have a shifting, inner fire inside it. Even the ivy plants radiated golden-green where the vines twisted around their climbing poles.

  Jer had never imagined such power, had never felt strength like this, had had no inkling of what was to come when he and his friends had gathered and each of them had knelt on a corner of the deep velvet throw on which he’d drawn his pentagram. Now an earthy-smelling incense wafted along the air, and candles, two black, one white, and two red, tipped each point, but their flames were more like powerful torches than candlelight. His left hand clasped Kari’s and his right was encased in Eddie’s. Between Eddie and Kari knelt Kialish, and Jer could see him from below his own half-closed lids. Kialish’s eyes were closed and his face, like that of his partner’s, was utterly serene.

  Perhaps that was where this surge of power, this incredible energy had come from—the two young men were inseparable, like two pieces of a puzzle made only for each other. Different from the traditional man-woman duo, perhaps it was this very uniqueness that brought with it a strange new force—

  —like the unseen energy that was literally lifting them all off the floor. Jer smiled slightly and concentrated on the flames, trying to make them shrink, then grow again. To his delight, they obeyed, shriveling to almost nothing, then climbing high and strong at his mental command. Yes, this was a learning experience for all of them. And they would learn, all right, the four of them, explore not only the challenges of newly discovered power that they could feed to each other, but other things, too. With that willingness to learn would no doubt come new power, and other things, too.

  Like the ability to defeat his father . . .

  THIRTEEN

  WORT MOON

  Act your will on those we’ve cursed

  The Deveraux name will grow and spread

  As we dance upon the Cahors dead

  And poison the most innocent flower

  Poisons to destroy, poisons to maim

  Poisons to control, poisons to chain

  Upon their knees our enemies fall

  In defeat or death they obey our call

  Tante Cecile had a vision.

  She called and told Holly to go down into the basement of the Andersons’ mansion. There she should find more history of the family, in the form of a journal much like the one Isabeau had deposited for Holly on the beach.

  Yecch. Spiders.

  Holly shuddered and brushed away yet another cobweb dangling down from the low ceiling over the stairs as she made her way into the basement.

  She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked around in some dismay. The basement was crammed to the rafters with an assortment of boxes, trunks, old suitcases, and bags. She sighed deeply. It was going to be a long and messy search.

  It was too bad her cousins had gone out, Nicole to rehearsal and Amanda to the library to see if she could find some more books about witchcraft.

  Where to start?

  One would think the stack nearest the stairs would be the newest stuff, but judging from the thick layer of dust and the omnipresent cobwebs, it wasn’t. It’d obviously been a long time since anyone had been down here; an empty glass stood
on the windowsill, a grimy layer of dust floating in it. She’d have to remember to bring that upstairs when she left.

  Intent on her task, she didn’t hear the soft scrambling in the walls.

  An hour later, she found what she had been sent for: a potential treasure trove of information about the feud between the Cahors and the Deveraux. The large book was old and bound with some kind of skin—again with the yecch—and her high school French wasn’t quite up to the task of translating the archaic version of the language in the faded manuscript before her, but she caught enough words here and there to guess at the meaning. The two surnames were there, no doubt about that . . . foeu—that should be the ancient version of feu, or fire . . . yes, there was ignire in the same sentence, and taken together, that had to mean ignite. . . .

  A strange sound echoing in the quiet, a sort of clambering, as if someone were climbing up a gravel hill, broke her concentration. She looked around and cocked her head, listening intently. There it was again. It seemed to be coming from inside the walls. Ewwww. Mice.

  Maybe the cats should sleep down here for a few nights, and decrease the surplus population. She shrugged and returned to the ancient manuscript, trying to puzzle out a few more words. Then, with a sigh of frustration, she set it aside. Maybe they could find someone to translate it for them later, but she was at the limit of her linguistic ability.

  She dove into the trunk again, this time pulling out a rectangular piece of black silk cloth. Carefully, she unfolded it to reveal a border of delicate lilies embroidered in silver, with a silver hawk in the center—the Cahors family emblems. She caught her breath. This was definitely another of the family heirlooms.

  Wow. Something’s riled up the mice, for sure.

  She peered at the walls, looking for mouse holes, but there was too much junk piled up against them for her to see much of anything. She shrugged, and set the shawl aside on top of the manuscript.

  They came when she was bent over the trunk, delving into its contents once more. Not mice, but rats. Large, brown, long-tailed rats. Dozens of them. Without warning, they poured out of the walls from behind the trunks, their claws clicking on the cement floor like a hundred miniature castanets.

  Startled by the noise, Holly started up and banged her head on the trunk lid, dazing herself for a moment. In that short time, the rats had seemingly multiplied a hundred times—there were rats everywhere, and all of them were headed straight for her.

  The path from the trunk to the stairs was already covered in wall-to-wall rats, chittering and snapping at one another; there was no easy out there. Any doubt that she was the target of the rats’ interest vanished when the first ones reached her and sunk their teeth into her boots. She hurriedly shook them off, but more surged forward.

  Better think of something quick, Holly.

  The only protection spells she had learned required materials she didn’t have. Her ward was upstairs; here, there was nothing around she could use as a weapon . . . or was there? She grabbed the book and started swinging.

  THWACK! A rat went flying across the basement, landing with a satisfying thud against the wall. Her cousins would be out of the house, today. THWACK! Two more rats temporarily out of commission.

  Bast! Call the cat!

  “Bast, help! Aides-moi!” she screamed as loud as she could.

  THWACK! THWACK! The rats were moving in fast now, and she couldn’t keep up with them. Her arms were getting tired. She expected to feel their teeth in her legs at any minute, and once they drew blood, she knew it would be all but over.

  She caught a glimpse of a ginger streak coming down the stairs, followed by two other blurs, one black, one white, before the three Cathers cats launched themselves into the fray. They knew just what to do, and they were merciless.

  The pile of dead and seriously injured rats grew quickly, and it didn’t take long before the rest of the pack decided to withdraw. Within minutes, it all was over, with only the blood and bodies of dead rats to prove it had happened at all.

  “Thank you, Freya. Thank you, Hecate. And thank you, Bast.” She picked Bast up and kissed the top of her head before gently setting her back on the floor.

  Bast meowed in reply, and Holly got the hell out of there.

  The book was a history of the Cahors and Deveraux, but had no author and no hint as to when it was written. Tante Cecile could only say that Isabeau had come to her in a dream and told her where to find it.

  It told them this: that the six hundredth anniversary of the Massacre of Deveraux Castle was on the next full moon, which was Mead Moon. And it said one thing that Holly, Amanda, and Nicole kept pondering:

  The ones whom I trusted most were my betrayers.

  And the weird thing was, senior year kept happening. As if someone was checking off all the events that should matter most to them, the cousins did Senior Ditch Day; and went to the prom with Tommy Nagai as their escort; and then it was the last part of April, and time for the school play. . . .

  . . . and Jer Deveraux, leader of the Rebel Coven, couldn’t believe that Nicole and her cousins were proceeding with everything as if their lives were normal.

  Maybe I’m the one who had to forfeit the normal life, he thought, because my life has never been normal.

  Meanwhile, Kari finally confessed and told him about Circle Lady on the Web, and the cyberpagan’s interest in “Warlock,” and he dared to hope:

  Jer: Yo, Circle Lady, Warlock here.

  Circle Lady: Hello. I’ve heard so much about you.

  Jer: I think you know me very well.

  But she wouldn’t come right out and admit that she was his mother. He burned to ask her directly, but the times were blistering with danger. She had already risked so much contacting Kari, and she avoided his prying like a mouse dodging a cat. So he took the risks, telling her everything he knew, and finally, the one thing she did tell him was this:

  Circle Lady: The girls you speak of are in great danger, and may die on the next full moon.

  So he worked with that, taking the knowledge to his coven, discussing it with Dan.

  Under his guidance, sweating in the lodge alone, Jer had seen part of his family’s history that his father had kept to himself, and Jer reeled.

  Castle Deveraux crouched, magnificent and terrifying, dark as a raven and soulless as a demon. It sprawled low along the ground, its very belly within the earth, and only its hunched shoulders punched toward the sky. To the fearful villagers it was the embodiment of evil, the dwelling of the devil himself. Still, these were not things that were whispered, not even between husband and wife as they crouched at their hearth on cold nights and listened to the wind crying outside. And at noon if strange shadows danced over the top of the castle, they just crossed themselves and hurried about their business, lips pressed tightly shut in fear.

  Whether the castle had been polluted by the people living in it or the people by the evil lurking in the walls of the castle, none knew. The origins of both the Deveraux family and their castle were unknown, going back many generations and lost in the mists of time. The oldest living man in the village, the old blacksmith, could only vaguely remember stories he had heard from his earliest childhood, seventy summers past. Now blind and idle he lived inside his mind, waiting for his body to die and trying to remember the things that had been whispered to him about the castle. They were whispers he had heard from his older brother.

  The next dawn had found the older boy dead, torn to pieces by wolves who had dragged him from his bed while he slept and left his body at the edge of the forest. Two different stories the old man had heard on that night so long ago. One was that the devil had created the castle from dirt and his own blood, set it upon the great hill and placed his chosen ones in it. The other story had frightened the old man even more, but now he couldn’t even remember it if he wanted to.

  The walls were strong, built of dark stone that reflected none of the sun’s light but only swallowed it in darkness. Still, it could be seen from a
great distance, hideous in its appearance. At a monastery far distant it had once been visible through a window in the chapel. Many a priest both young and old had found himself shivering while staring at the distant castle instead of the statue of the Virgin whom he was praying to.

  The Deveraux were wealthy with connections far above those of the humble priests. Still, it was hard to ignore the evil they felt spilling from the place and to close their ears to the strange sounds sometimes heard late at night when no godly person should be awake. Eventually something had to be said, and it was. The Bishop was sympathetic, reassuring, and had a solution. Within a fortnight a beautiful stained-glass window graced the humble chapel. A barrier between the good priests and the evil of the Deveraux Castle. And though puzzled, the good priests were slightly reassured and more than a little grateful. After all, they had no idea that the money to pay for the window had come from the very castle whose sight it was meant to obscure.

  Life continued on for the priests who felt much safer because of the window. Its bright reds and greens comforted them and protected them. The colors shielded them from the outside world, keeping them and all their knowledge, all their faith, safely locked up in the monastery. And one dark autumn night while they held a midnight mass the window and its bright colors kept them from seeing the flames that were engulfing the Deveraux Castle.

  But they knew it was burning. Deveraux women, children, and men at arms . . . the priests knew they would die that night, by Cahors hands.

  They prayed fervently for success. They prayed that the Deveraux would be completely wiped out.

  And then, the Blessed Virgin willing, the church would turn on the Cahors, and make them taste the flames as well—the fires of the stake, and an eternity in Hell for their witchcraft.

  Within the castle all were asleep, or were meant to be. Inside the stables a horse squealed, frightened by a demon that he alone could see. A tired keeper rose from his bed to quiet the animal. His son, a boy of five, looked up at him with sleepy eyes. The child was curled against a horse’s stomach for warmth, the beast’s shoulder pillowing his tiny head. The horse lifted his head as well, ears swiveling uneasily.