Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1)

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

“Okay.” Gosha cradled the receiver under her chin as she lit the candles. A warm glow spilled across the table.

  “Good,” said her mother. “Elsie, tell them we’re ready.”

  One by one, the candles began to sputter and smoke. Loud snaps and cracks cut through the quiet of the house as the smoke began to cluster over the center of the table. The reflection in each mirror darkened as the glass rippled like water on the surface of a pond. When the mirrors stilled, each had become a window into a different room. Her mother’s face moved into the frame of the largest mirror to Gosha’s left.

  “I have it,” she said, her voice emanating from both the receiver and the mirror. “It’s working.”

  Mrs. Dearing appeared in the mirror next to her, one of her mother’s friends stepping into each of the rest.

  “Are we all here?” said her mother.

  Each of the witches acknowledged that they were.

  “Hang up the phone, Gosha.”

  “So, tell us,” said the gray-haired South Asian witch, Shreya, dressed in another beautiful sari, this one green and blue. “How did it go?”

  “The Betrayal,” said her mother. “Tell them. You can be honest. We’re all sisters here.”

  Gosha looked at the expectant faces as she considered her experience. So much had happened in the hours since rolling around on Esher Green, it seemed years ago.

  “It was terrifying, overwhelming. I thought I was going to die.”

  The witches all nodded in sympathy.

  “When I did mine in China,” said the Chinese witch, Mei, “I had a seizure, broke my arm and bit off the tip of my tongue.”

  She stuck her tongue out to show.

  “And the Queen?” asked Eleanor, the young-looking English witch. “Did you go all the way to Penrith?”

  “Oh, honestly, Eleanor,” said Mei. “Read a newspaper or something. That was the old Queen. She died more than a decade ago. The new one lives in Surrey.”

  “Show us your talisman,” said Mrs. Dearing.

  The others all chimed in, agreeing. As Gosha took it from her pocket and held it out before them, they all oohed and ahhed.

  “A lipstick,” said Eleanor. “What a good idea.”

  “It’s very sleek,” said Mei. “Seamless flow integration. It should be able to channel a lot of power. Very impressive.”

  “She did well, your daughter,” said Shreya.

  Gosha’s mother beamed with pride as the others all agreed.

  “And now, ladies, she needs our help.”

  “Show us,” said Shreya. “Show us the spell.”

  Gosha retrieved her makeup kit and the road atlas from her handbag by the door and replicated the finding spell. The cloud of face powder once again burned away to nothing.

  “He’s the saint of Desire?” said Shreya.

  “Yes, that’s what he said. His name is Emerson Margrave.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He said he’s trying to fuse his sphere with my husband’s. Is that possible?”

  Mei let out a yelp, and an almighty crash came from somewhere beyond her mirror. Her head disappeared.

  “Mei, did you try to find him yourself?” said Mrs. Dearing.

  Mei ran past the mirror with an electric iron in one hand and a large kitchen knife in the other.

  “I suppose anything’s possible,” said Eleanor. “As much as the high and mighty would like to think their domains are carved in stone, the spheres emerge from us. Anything human is subject to change. An entire sphere was eradicated hundreds of years ago because it became too powerful and all the others organized against it. If that can happen, there’s no reason two spheres couldn’t be merged into one, although I don’t know how it would be done.”

  “With the sacrifice of a host of innocents,” said Gosha.

  “Just a minute,” shouted Mei from beyond the view of the mirror.

  “Shouldn’t we help her?” asked Gosha.

  “Who, Mei?” said Shreya, shaking her head. “She can take care of herself.”

  “He’ll be difficult to find,” said Eleanor. “The slightest hint of his plan getting out would bring the other spheres down on him before you could curse your neighbor’s cow.”

  The sound of a hundred pots and pans clattering to the ground from beyond Mei’s mirror filled the kitchen. As the din subsided, Mei slipped back into frame, running her fingers through her long, straight hair.

  “He’s a bastard, that one,” she said. “Ruined my best bowl. Well, now we know how he’s masking himself. It’s complex, many layers deep. A particularly vicious spell with limited autonomy. This saint must be an old one. Knows how to keep his business private. That basic finding charm you’re using won’t be powerful enough to break through it. We need something devious and serpentine. Any suggestions?”

  An animated discussion ensued, the witches arguing among themselves about technicalities of Craft that were meaningless to Gosha. Most of these women were strangers to her, but their willingness to help when she was so woefully inexperienced, just a newborn to their world of ancient secrets, comforted her.

  She thought back on the handful of times she’d used the finding spell. The experience had been different the times it worked compared to when it hadn’t. When she was successful in finding Miranda at her house in the mews, the impression of her created by the spell word drifted away into the powder. With the blocked spell, the impression had lingered, her presence powerful, but removed.

  It reminded Gosha of the weeks after her father died. At first, though he was gone, his memory held on. She would go into the living room and be shocked that he wasn’t sitting in his chair watching the races on the telly. She would see his gardening gloves gone from their place in the greenhouse and look for him pruning his roses at the bottom of the garden. The more time passed, his lingering impression faded. The way he looked, the way he smelled, the sound of his heavy feet walking across the bedroom floor upstairs when she was down in the kitchen, all faded. And yet, she might see the evening paper delivery on the doorstep, or his shoes in the downstairs cupboard, and she would feel his presence so strongly it was if he were standing behind her, looking over her shoulder. This was the way she experienced Miranda’s presence when she cast the spell for her mother’s friends.

  “Shreya, Shreya, you’re wrong,” said Mei, shouting over the South Asian witch and snapping Gosha out of her reverie.

  “Mamusha,” she said, turning to her mother in her gilded frame. “Tell me exactly why the finding spell isn’t working.”

  “Your devil-man has created an effigy of himself, like the one you made this morning, but out of Influence that he has twisted and shaped and given life. The saints call it a shade. It has no substance, no real shape, but it stands between him and any use of Influence to seek him out.”

  “And Mei said we needed something more serpentine.”

  Mei and Shreya continued to bicker, ignoring Gosha’s side-conversation with her mother.

  “Yes,” said her mother. “We need to find your friend without asking for her directly, a spell to carry the request around the shade, but the bastard thing is clever. It knows we’re looking for its principal. There are only so many paths to find something. If we try another spell and it doesn’t work the first time, then it’s useless to us.”

  Her mother turned her attention back to the discussion among her friends.

  Something about what she said nagged at Gosha from the back of her mind, but whenever it drew close, it slipped away before she could catch it. She loved her kitchen, but it wasn’t the part of the house where she was most at home, where her mind was most free to wander. She got up from the table without drawing attention to herself and made her way upstairs to her workroom.

  The portrait of Miranda stood out in its frame in the light of its overhead spot. This Miranda, captured at the beginning of her career before disappointment and addiction, was filled with hope. Morning light shone in through the picture window as she lean
ed against its frame and stared out over the rooftops of Cheyne Heath. Though Miranda’s pose was easy and casual, Gosha had spent weeks preparing for the shoot, doing study after study to compose the shot just the way she wanted. In the scene around her were representations of things Miranda held most dear: her favorite guitar resting against the wall near her feet; the records that inspired her the most spread out in piles by the portable record player they had huddled around in their first flat. Interspersed with the memorabilia of Miranda’s life were other suggestions of her, objects that Gosha thought of when she thought of her friend: a hand-knitted shawl draped across the back of the chair; a delicate china tea-set on a silver tray next to a steamer trunk cracked open to reveal a hint of exotic fabrics. Everything in the picture reflected Miranda Lovelock.

  She stood back and raised a hand to block out the center of the image, leaving only the set dressing around her friend. The background was like a code. If someone had shown it to her, she would know that it signified Miranda.

  She inhaled sharply and rushed to her archive, a phalanx of file cabinets against one wall. With a surge of excitement, she rummaged through them to find prints of the studies she had made to prepare for the shoot. She found the folder at the back of a drawer, stuffed with prints and negatives that spilled out as she opened it up on her work bench. The exact print she wanted, the last one she took on the night before the shoot, leaped out at her from the mess. She held it up and compared it to the final shot on the wall.

  Exactly what I need.

  Downstairs, the discussion between the witches had turned into a commotion, all of them talking over each other.

  “Ladies!” She banged on the kitchen table to catch their attention. The mirrors jumped and the candle flames flickered.

  “What’s the best spell you’ve come up with,” she asked her mother.

  “It won’t work. It’s too subtle. We need something powerful to punch through the veil he’s dropped around himself.”

  “Just give it to me.”

  Her mother looked down and wrote, surprising Gosha that her abruptness hadn’t resulted in a reprimand. When her mother finished, she held up a pad with the word scrawled phonetically on it, each syllable separated by a dash, the emphasis marked with three sharp underlines. Gosha wrapped her fingers around her lipstick and mouthed the word, saying it in her mind, feeling its shape and resonance. Her mother was right. It was a more subtle and serpentine spell. Even the thought of it caused ripples in the flow of Influence within her.

  “I think I can make it work,” she said out loud, but more to the photographic print on the table before her than to the women watching.

  “Pelletethaneras.”

  Her awareness of the kitchen shifted. The cabinets and counters disappeared in the dark, as if the room had doubled or tripled in size. The sound of her breathing became loud in her ears and an owl hooted somewhere in the distance. Panic shocked through her, her heart racing as she recalled the twisting of reality in the cellar in Poland, but she shut the thought down hard.

  The spell had presence and intent like the curse her mother had given her, ready to take whatever she gave it and do her will, ready to race through the world to find whoever or whatever she wanted.

  In the dark beyond the candlelight, something stirred. Two slits of glowing, sickly yellow appeared an unimaginable distance away. The stench of rotting flesh wafted toward her, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

  In the test photograph, the set was lit and ready, the chair in which Miranda would sit the next day empty.

  The figure in the dark paced like a wild animal.

  Gosha ran her gaze across the photo. She had lived with the finished shot for years. Her mind tried to superimpose the image of Miranda upon it, but she blocked it out, only allowing the test shot to be real. When she was satisfied, when she captured the image in her mind’s eye exactly as she wanted it, she released the spell.

  The presence of the spell flitted away from her and the kitchen re-established itself. The evil shape pacing in the darkness vanished. Candle smoke clustered over the photograph into a dense cloud of rolling smog over the tabletop.

  The witches all began to talk at once, making Gosha jump, all of them saying the same thing:

  “Light a candle!”

  She snatched a candle from the box. The small, frayed wick took the flame from her match and burned brighter than any of the others on the table, blazing into a miniature torch in her hand. To her amazement, the flame detached itself from the wick, rising up to float in the air and drift away toward the front door.

  “Go, go, go,” cried her mother. “Follow it.”

  “Take the candle and the photograph with you,” said Mrs. Dearing as Gosha knocked her chair over jumping to her feet. “They tether the spell. Without them the sprite will dwindle and fade.”

  38

  The sprite built up speed to a steady pace of twenty-five miles per hour. London traffic made following it a challenge. If it drifted too far away, the sprite slowed and waited until she caught up, and the longer she took to get back in range, the dimmer it became. Once they got out of London, the sprite led her into Hertfordshire, where the back lanes made it easier to follow. Traveling the M1 at fifty miles per hour below the speed limit would guarantee she be stopped by the police and lose track of the delicate flame.

  The drive lulled her into a dangerous reverie. Her mind drifted back to the image of the dead and deformed body of Margrave’s thug sprawled across Miranda’s kitchen floor. Whatever good her mother thought she had done by giving her a curse with its own mind, Gosha was still the one who cast the spells. The responsibility was hers. It hurt to think he was someone’s child or someone’s lover. She could blame Margrave for his death, but that would be a lie.

  After almost two hours of torturing herself as she drove, the sprite slowed down at the end of a country road, drifted up over a high brick wall surrounding a tree-filled property, and winked out as it crossed the boundary.

  She turned off her headlights and parked the car on the side of the road. The night was cool and damp. The fresh smell of country air made her feel light and free after the oppressiveness of London. She gulped it in as she stepped out of the car and stretched her limbs. It would be so nice to get away, go somewhere deep in the countryside far from any other human contact, to sit and read and let all her troubles rage on without her. A few years ago, she and George had looked into renting a castle in a remote part of Wales for a vacation. To retreat behind those walls and be safe and build herself a new life would be bliss—

  She snapped back to reality and the present with a start. All sense of urgency had drained out of her, her mind wandering as if lives weren’t at stake.

  Focus, Gosha. Focus!

  With the car lights off, she had only the moon to see by under the dark sky, only the brightest stars visible through London’s light pollution, even this far away. She shivered as the cold night air seeped into her skin. Her t-shirt wasn’t much help. Playing chauffeur to children always left an endless supply of odds and ends in the car. She opened the trunk to see what she could dig up.

  As she popped the hatch, a nagging tugged at the corner of her awareness, an unease that made her want to get out of there. Up to now, she had been running on instinct, reacting with her gut. And here she was about to enter headlong and eyes open into an impossible situation, with nothing but a handful of spell words she didn’t know the meaning of and the hope that powers she didn’t understand would protect her. A powerful urge to get back into the car and drive back to London rose up in her, but she ignored it.

  In the trunk, nestled among a fresh bag of nappies, half-eaten bags of nuts and raisins, and the spare tire, she found her old leather jacket tucked next to a lug wrench. The jacket was a favorite of hers, a vintage nineteen-fifties biker jacket, well-worn and two sizes too big. Bought from a stall in Morel Market a decade ago, it had been her constant companion until Edmund was born and the zips
and hardware proved too tempting for questing young fingers. She slipped it on and it settled across her shoulders like the arms of an old friend.

  The L-shaped lug wrench weighed heavily in her right hand as she swung it back and forth. Awkward to wield, it would likely be more trouble than its worth, but, slipped through her belt, it grounded her and made her more confident that anyone who came upon her might see her as a threat.

  The wall surrounding Margrave’s estate was tall, but she could probably scale it from the roof of her car if she could park close enough. She got back into the driver’s seat and regretted the lug wrench straight away. As she struggled to get it out of her belt so she could sit properly, her body grew heavy. Exhaustion wrapped itself around her and weighed her down, a mountain of sand pouring over her. She blacked out.

  * * *

  She awoke to a cacophony of birdsong as the sky turned from black to gray with the sun rising above the trees. Hunger gnawed at her gut. She could eat the old snacks she found in the trunk, but there was a service station several miles back that would offer her a proper breakfast.

  She was back on the road and halfway there before she realized all thoughts of Miranda had vanished from her mind. She pulled over and squirmed the lipstick out of the pocket of her jeans. As she held it in her palm and her awareness opened, Influence pressed gently against her skin. This second sight was so confusing, neither touch nor sight, but with aspects of both. If she thought about it too much, her mind locked up and she lost it. If she surrendered and allowed it to wash over her, she could sense the flow of power as if looking at the world under an ultraviolet light that revealed every invisible speck.

  The Influence pressing at her skin called to the flow inside her, stoking it up, creating the unnamed desire making her mind wander, and must have made her fall asleep when she got back in the car. This must be deliberate, an effect that Margrave set up to turn the curious away. The wode sump, lying cool against her breastbone on its chain, hadn’t worked, perhaps because Margrave’s defense was a general field and not a spell directed at her.