Bone Lantern Witch

by Kat Simons

  Angie considered correcting Ellen’s assumption that magic was evil, because it was something she often found herself having to emphasize with people who didn’t understand the magical world. But she supposed the magic Grant had been messing with was evil, so she let the issue go. She didn’t want to distract Ellen.

  “It took me a few months of study and research and more snooping before I pieced it all together,” Ellen said. “What he’d been doing. In our basement. Right under my nose.” Her fist clenched in her lap and her arm tightened on Mara.

  Ellen glanced at Sebastian. “And you didn’t stop him. You stopped me. But not him.”

  “I wasn’t called to him,” Sebastian said, not sounding upset at the accusation. “My job isn’t an exact science, unfortunately. And I wasn’t the hunter sent to stop Grant.”

  “Someone else was?” she asked. “Because I never saw them.”

  Sebastian didn’t answer. He just held Ellen’s gaze, his expression soft.

  Angie wondered at that. If another hunter had gone to stop Grant, wouldn’t Sebastian have known? The hunters kept a history. The community was small and they all knew each other. If someone had died fighting off a demon Grant had summoned because it was about to escape, the hunters would know. Shouldn’t Sebastian have known who Grant was before all this?

  Or had he, and he’d left that out of what he’d told her about the situation?

  “If they’d stopped him,” Ellen went on, “none of this would have happened.” She flicked a glance at Mara and frowned. “I wouldn’t have had to give up my daughter just to survive and keep her safe.”

  “He still offered me to the demon,” Mara said. “None of it worked.”

  Ellen’s expression collapsed then, and tears leaked down her face. She hugged Mara closer, tucking her daughter’s head under her chin. “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  Angie sat quietly for a few moments, giving the mother and daughter time to settled their emotions. Then she prompted Ellen to continue. “What did you do after you found out Grant was summoning a demon?”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Ellen said, still clinging to her daughter. “I spent another week just considering my options. I didn’t really understand the demon stuff and at first tried to convince myself he was just crazy, worshipping something that didn’t exist. Finally, I fell back on research. I figured the more I knew and understood, the better able I’d be to make a decision.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?” Angie asked quietly. It was a question that had to be asked. “You had a supportive family that would have taken you in.”

  And in this case, Ellen had also been the one with the money. She wasn’t beholden to or dependent on Grant, not the way so many abused women ended up. But emotions and emotional abuse were a lot more complicated than just having money and a support system to turn to. Angie wanted to understand what made Ellen stay long enough to have a child. Knowing who Mara’s father was might also clear up some of the story.

  Ellen didn’t meet her gaze when she said, “I was ashamed. I’d gotten myself into the mess with Bart. I didn’t want to go to my parents and admit I couldn’t handle the situation. That I’d been so very wrong.” She shrugged. “And I was afraid my father would have him killed.”

  Angie blinked. She’d said that so bluntly, as if it wasn’t just a euphemism.

  Ellen said, “I was their only child and they were always very protective. If they thought there was even a hint of someone abusing me, they wouldn’t rest until he suffered for it. Neither of them. But my mother would have been more…merciless. My father would have just had him quietly murdered.” Ellen shook her head. “I didn’t want that. Not on my parents’ souls just because I’d made a mistake. And, though I can’t believe it now, looking back, a part of me still loved him. I suppose I maybe thought I could save him? I don’t know. It’s been so long. I don’t remember what I was thinking. But I knew I had to handle the situation on my own.”

  She glanced at Mara, then ducked her chin. “I made mistakes there, too.”

  “Mara said she isn’t Grant’s daughter,” Angie prompted.

  “She’s not.” Ellen confirmed. “He can’t have kids as it turns out. He tried with other women after… After we didn’t succeed. But it’s something wrong with him.” She chuckled, a very unpleasant sound. “There’s something cosmically perfect about that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the asshole sold his firstborn child to a demon for money and power.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Silence followed Ellen’s statement. Angie stared at her as all the pieces started to fall into place and the threads started coming together. Especially Grant’s anger when Ellen couldn’t get pregnant.

  Ellen shivered hard, a rough jerk of her shoulders as if tossing off a bad feeling, and said again, more quietly, “He’d promised his firstborn to an evil entity and then couldn’t produce a child of his own.”

  “Did he marry you specifically for creating a baby he could give to the demon?” Angie asked.

  Ellen winced but didn’t shy away from Angie’s bluntness. “Yes. I was supposedly his ‘reward’ from the demon. His way of accessing the money and power he wanted, and of conveniently producing a child he could sacrifice. From the beginning, I was a means to an end for him. Never love. Never any feelings at all.” She pressed her lips together hard enough the skin around them turned white. It took her several deep breaths before she relaxed enough to continue. “I’ve never been sure what hurt the most. His betrayal, or knowing just how stupid I was at that time.”

  “We all make mistakes when it comes to love,” Angie said. She was thinking of her clients, but her gaze jumped to Sebastian and she had to look away. No one was immune to mistakes when it came to love.

  To his credit, Sebastian didn’t react to her comment in any way. Not even with a muscle twitch in his jaw. If he’d taken offense, or viewed her comment as a personal jab at him, he kept that to himself.

  “Ellen,” Angie continued when silence descended for too long. “I have to ask. If you knew what Grant was trying to do, why did you have a child?”

  Ellen stared at Mara. “I really wanted a baby,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t take chances on having one with Grant, though. But my research led me to some interesting information.” She met Angie’s gaze. “Did you know, if a human offers up a child not of their own blood as sacrifice to a demon they’ve made a blood deal with, the demon will consider that a breach of the agreement and kill the human who’s summoned it?”

  Angie did know that, but she didn’t do more than nod. The fact that Ellen had known before having Mara meant Ellen wanted to arrange Grant’s death. She was admitting, essentially, to planning a murder. Or, maybe more accurately, a suicide. If looked at from a certain angle.

  “It took me a long time to decide if I really wanted Bart dead or not,” Ellen said. “I knew I didn’t want my parents to have anything to do with it, but after a time, I wasn’t as opposed to having that stain on my soul.”

  “Things got worse in your relationship with him?”

  Ellen gave a brief nod. “We fought a lot. I didn’t ever admit I’d found his altar, but I did quietly go on the pill so I wouldn’t get pregnant. He got increasingly angry about the lack of a child, and we fought over that often. Then we fought about other things. I finally decided he’d earned whatever came his way when he hit me the first time.”

  “First time?”

  “The only time until… Until much later. He’d lifted his hand and stopped himself a few times before that, especially when we fought over not getting pregnant. But I guess he finally couldn’t resist anymore, and he punched me. In the gut. Stole my breath and knocked me to my knees for a few minutes. He got in my face and said things would go worse for me if I couldn’t give him the child he’d asked for, the only thing I was supposedly good for in our marriage.”

  Angie worked not to fist her hands in
her lap. She wasn’t new to stories of abuse. It came up in her work. She’d studied some of this in college, too, as her degree was in psychology. But still, she had trouble containing her rage. Grant was a monster, as much as the demon he’d summoned, and Angie wanted to curse him so badly, she had to concentrate hard not to issue one.

  From her, that curse would be real. And it would have repercussions. A witch learned early on to be careful of such things. They could backfire. And they could come back to haunt the witch in unpredictable ways. Angie didn’t do curses. Ever.

  But this was one of those times she would have considered making an exception.

  She silently swallowed her anger and let Ellen continue without interrupting her.

  “I made a decision then,” Ellen said quietly. “One I don’t regret because I have Mara, but…” She shook her head. “I went to a sperm bank. Well, I went off the pill first and then avoided Bart’s bed for a couple of weeks, feigning illness. I’d gotten good at timing my cycles before I learned what my husband really wanted, so I fell back into that rhythm easily. This time, I ensured I was sick or otherwise engaged during my fertile periods. I had to use a day-after pill once, when he…he surprised me.”

  “Rape?”

  “No. I always went along with the sex because I didn’t want him to get suspicious. He never had to force me. I didn’t let it get to that point. But I didn’t have an excuse lined up, and he caught me just at the end of my ovulation cycle so I went for the backup just in case.” She shrugged. “I only had to do this for a couple of months before I was ready for the artificial insemination, though. And I got pregnant immediately.” Her chuff of laughter was full of bitterness. “I got pregnant easily,” she said, “without Bart’s bad sperm getting in the way.”

  “So you don’t know who Mara’s father is?”

  “Just a number and a medical background. Some physical details. I hoped she’d at least vaguely resemble me and Bart. I didn’t want him suspicious right away.”

  “What happened when he found out you were pregnant?”

  “Everything in our relationship changed. He became the most loving, devoted husband. You’d think he’d been replaced with another man.” She dropped her gaze to her lap. “And you know…for a few months, I almost believed the change. I almost believed that all his anger had really been about just desperately wanting a baby. I started to talk myself into believing he hadn’t ever really intended to sacrifice anything to a demon. That I’d somehow misinterpreted what I’d found, what I’d learned in my research. That it was all in my imagination. I almost…almost fell for his lies all over again.”

  She shuddered and fell silent. Angie didn’t push, though she wanted to hear the rest. The puzzle was coming together. She could just about see the picture now and she imagined she knew what happened next. But she wanted Ellen to tell them in her own time.

  Finally, Ellen let out a deep breath. “After Mara was born, I was… I was in pretty bad shape for a few weeks. Exhausted all the time. I might have had a little post-partum depression, but I never talked to anyone about it, so I’m not sure. I found myself bursting into tears while I was nursing for no good reason. And Mara was a hungry baby so she ate a lot.”

  Mara rolled her eyes at her mother over this, and Ellen gave her a found smile. The moment of lightness vanished quickly from Ellen’s expression.

  “One night, about six weeks after Mara was born, when I was really really worn out and just needed to sleep, Bart offered to look after her for a few hours. Give me a chance to shower and nap, maybe even eat without a baby in my lap—which was a luxury because Mara didn’t like being put down, so I had to carry her a lot. Anyway, I was so tired at this stage I agreed. I’d… I don’t know. I guess I forgot all about the demon threat because I was so happy to have Mara but so exhausted from the new experience of having a baby. And Bart had been kind and loving and the best of husbands for almost a year. It felt like our troubles were well behind us.”

  She met Angie’s gaze, avoiding Sebastian’s when she said, “I took a shower and a nap, while he took my baby, my beloved, sweet, innocent baby, into the basement to sacrifice her to a demon.”

  The starkness in Ellen’s expression made Angie want to weep and pull her into a hug. She didn’t dare touch her. Not with all those memories and emotions so close to the surface. It would take more control than Angie thought she had to not see that past or feel Ellen’s guilt. She could feel that guilt from a distance. Touch would be overwhelming.

  Tears leaked down Ellen’s cheeks as she said, “He woke me from a sound sleep by tossing Mara at me. Tossed her. She was just a baby! And he threw her onto the bed like a sack. She was crying so hard. I was disoriented. I grabbed and held her instinctively, trying to sooth her. I was distracted by her crying and didn’t at first understand why Bart was yelling or what he was saying. Then it sank in.”

  She closed her eyes as she said, “He accused me of having an affair, that he knew the baby wasn’t his, and he called me all sorts of awful names. The usual whore, cunt…worse. He said I’d betrayed him by giving birth to a bastard.”

  “When did you realize what had happened?” Angie asked quietly.

  “I don’t remember for sure. Sometime during his rant, while I was trying to sooth Mara. It hit me that he had tried to sacrifice our…my daughter. That of course she’d been rejected because she wasn’t of his blood, wasn’t what he’d promised his demon. Which had been my original plan, even though I’d lost sight of that. I was still too disoriented for much of this to sink in. Eventually, he slammed out of the room, claiming he was going to divorce me.” She met Angie’s gaze. “He would lose everything my parents had given him if he divorced me, but at that moment, I didn’t realize that either.”

  She hugged Mara closer again, and Mara showed no signs of objecting. The girl’s expression was carefully closed off, at least as much as was possible for a guarded twelve-year-old, but her jaw was tight and her bottom lip trembled slightly. She leaned into her mother’s embrace and kept her gaze focused on the coffee table.

  “I didn’t sleep the rest of that night,” Ellen continued. “I held Mara as she finally slept and thought about what had happened, about my options. What I would have to do. The demon hadn’t killed him like I thought it would, since he’d offered a baby not of his own blood. Since he wasn’t dead, I assumed he’d talked his way out of it. He’d somehow talked the demon into an alternative deal. A deal I didn’t know.”

  “Which meant you couldn’t anticipate what he would do next,” Angie said.

  “Exactly. I didn’t know if he intended to kill us, or… Well, I didn’t know what he intended, couldn’t even guess. I just knew I had to protect Mara no matter what it took. I looked into her little face, knowing I’d almost let that bastard murder her, and I could never allow that again.”

  How the hell did she end up living with him, then? Angie thought, but didn’t ask aloud. She’d derail the story if she did, she was sure. But in all this, the fact that Mara had ended up living with a man who’d tried to sacrifice her to a demon when she was just a baby was the part that most baffle Angie. The rest, she understood in its way. The rest she could sort of find the flawed logical thread. But why not run away with Mara? Why not go into hiding from Grant and keep Mara protected?

  Why the hell had Mara spent the last twelve years with a murderer when her mother was still alive?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Angie’s cellphone broke through the heavy atmosphere just as she opened her mouth to ask another question. She winced. “Sorry.”

  She dug the phone out of her bag, intending to turn the ringer off, but when she saw the caller ID on the screen, she paused. She frowned up at Sebastian. “It’s work.”

  “They shouldn’t be calling you?” he asked and stated at the same time.

  “Not on my night off after they’ve already seen me once. Anything they had to tell me, they could have while I was there.” She answered the call.

&n
bsp; “Ang? Laura here. Am I interrupting anything?”

  “What’s wrong, Laura? Did I forget something when I was in earlier?” She couldn’t tell Laura she was interrupting a discussion of demons. Well, actually, Laura would understand. But the information wasn’t hers to tell so unless it was vital, she’d keep Ellen and Mara’s confidences.

  “I didn’t think this could wait,” Laura said sounding hesitant. “There was a…a man in here earlier. He was asking about you. Real pushy. Kept trying to insist I tell him where you were, if you were in the store… This guy’s aura was super dirty, Ang. He gave me the willies. So I thought I’d better warn you someone like that was looking for you.”

  “Did he leave a message? Give you his name?” She held Sebastian’s gaze as she talked. He couldn’t hear what Laura was saying, she knew, but he’d be able to tell from her expression this was something serious.

  “No name, but he did leave a card with a number on it and said you should call him immediately.”

  “What did he look like? Besides his aura,” she added, because if she didn’t that was what Laura would lead with.

  “Short, rail thin, dark brown hair, brown eyes, very very pale skin. Like if not for the brown hair and eyes he’d have looked like he didn’t have any pigment at all. His features were kind of skeletal, the cheekbones and jaw line very prominent. His eyes seemed a little sunken. And he didn’t have eyebrows which was a startling look given his dark hair. I might not have noticed that if his hair had been blond.”

  Angie frowned. That didn’t sound like Grant. But maybe one of Grant’s associates? She’d been living a quiet life until that afternoon, at least for the last year and a half. She doubted this had anything to do with her specifically. The man wasn’t one of her clients or Laura would recognize him—and Angie didn’t work with people who had auras Laura claimed were that “dirty” anyway. This had to be something to do with Grant and the demons.