Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  “Michael, no!” There was a whole chorus saying it, Shane included, but it was already too late. Michael’s fangs slid down, sharp and dangerous. He’d nicked his finger before she could even finish her sentence, and held it out. One drop hit the floor between them.

  Then Jane held out her palm, and the second drop hit her skin. She closed the hand into a fist, and for a second she looked like that ancient old woman again. Then like a very young girl, fresh-faced and innocent. Then back to her current—false—form. “Thank you,” she said.

  “What have you done, boy?” Oliver shouted, but it was too late; Jane wasn’t there anymore. Gone, in a whisper of shadows. “Witches are liars! And she’s no different!”

  “Burn that store down,” Amelie said. Her face had gone stark white. “Burn her out. Do it now.”

  * * *

  Shane got to the storefront just as the first flames took hold.

  Amelie stood under the shadow of the Common Grounds awning with Oliver.

  “Shit,” Shane said, and took out his cell phone. Dialed the fire department. As slow as they were, it probably wouldn’t do any good, but he had to try, at least.

  “Shane,” Claire said. She was still holding Carrie, who’d gone to sleep again, and she shielded the baby’s head instinctively as she watched the place burning. “My God, is she inside?”

  “I hope to heaven she is,” Amelie said. “The last thing we need is a vengeful witch in Morganville, empowered by the freely given blood of a vampire. She could do anything. Raise the dead from their graves. Set demons loose on our streets. Curse every one of us with a vile plague—” Her voice died out, and Shane turned to look where she was staring.

  Jane Penwell walked out of the fire. She was on fire, but an impatient brush of her hands down her tight pink dress put that out in a wisp of smoke, and she paused in the middle of the street. She had one of those giant coffee mugs in her hand.

  “I could do all that,” she agreed, as if she’d heard the whole thing. “And any town that gladly welcomes leeches like you no doubt ought to suffer. But I’m not here for vengeance, I told you that. I’m here for this.”

  She poured the cup into the street. A thick, black stream of liquid that even from twenty feet away smelled like coffee, but wasn’t. It hit the street in thick, splattering drops… and then it drew together into a puddle.

  Then it grew.

  “Claire,” Shane said, “maybe you’d better go.”

  She backed off a couple of steps, but his lady never really ran, not from a fight. Not even when she had a child to protect. Maybe especially not then.

  The puddle spread out in an oily, shimmering circle, and then it suddenly began to retract.

  It built itself up in black ropes like vines that whipped around each other, taller and taller. Knee-high, then waist-high. Then up to Shane’s shoulders.

  A rough human shape, black and iridescent on its surface.

  Then it turned gray and stiff, like an unfinished statue.

  Jane whispered, “Malleus,” and cracks formed across the surface. They spread out in webs, and then the creature took a step forward toward her, and the gray stony surface broke apart and showered in dust to the street.

  A naked man fell into Jane’s arms, and she held him tight. She whispered another word, and clothes formed around him—black pants, a black jacket.

  He looked like Michael. A perfect copy of him, in fact.

  “Jesus,” Shane breathed. “What the hell did you do?”

  “It’s only an initial form. He’ll look different soon enough,” Jane said. “I thank you, Master Michael Glass, for the loan of your blood. Jonathan will find his own face, and we’ll trouble you no more.”

  Michael’s doppelgänger turned and looked at him… but those weren’t Mike’s eyes. Not at all. They were black, not blue, and they were really unsettling, sitting in a friend’s face.

  “What is this place?” Not Michael’s voice, either.

  “Insignificant,” Jane said. “Except it brought you back to me.”

  John—at least, that’s what Shane assumed—fitted his hands around Jane’s face. “You brought me back. You and I, love. Finally.”

  “Finally,” she said, and smiled. “After all this time. I’m sorry it had to be this way. But I could never bring back an innocent human soul. You understand.”

  “I do now.” His face was changing. Not so much Michael now; it was a squarer face with a sharper chin, clever dark eyes. Hair turning brown and thick and growing long. “Leave the vampires to their dust and desperation. We can be more. We can own the world, if you like.”

  “My love, I only wanted you. Not the world entire. Never that.”

  “And you have me,” he said, and kissed her. “Forever.”

  He was still changing, Shane realized. Not a man at all now. His skin reddened. He grew horns. And leathery wings that rustled like autumn leaves. Shane’s mouth went dry, and he wanted to not know this. Desperately. Because when the devil looked at him, its eyes were human.

  “He’s a demon,” Amelie said. “You called a demon.”

  “It was the only way to bring Jonathan back to me. He’s my demon,” Jane said. “Not yours. And we won’t trouble you again.” She sighed and stepped into the demon’s arms. Put her head against its chest. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Take us home, my love.”

  That’s when the fire raging through Dark Brews exploded upward into a whirling tornado, rushed out into the street, and whipped the two of them into the center of it. It only lasted a few seconds, and then it just… died.

  All that was left was drifting ash and a pile of charred bone.

  Silence. The Dark Brew storefront was a blackened, burned-out shell. The desert wind stirred the ashes and blew them into Shane’s face, and he coughed and tried to spit out the bitterness.

  “Good riddance,” Oliver said, and turned and went back into Common Grounds. Turned the sign from CLOSED to OPEN.

  “What just happened here?” Shane asked his wife. Claire shook her head. “Did… did we just see that?”

  “Witch summoning her dead husband, who turned into a demon and took her to Hell?”

  “Yeah. That?”

  “Probably not?”

  “Okay.” He felt tired. Exhausted, in fact. “Just another damn day in Morganville.”

  “Even for Morganville, that was weird.” She linked arms with him and looked up into his face. He kissed her. It was impulsive, and her lips tasted like cool, sweet water. A refuge in the madness, always. “Need some coffee?”

  He shuddered. “I’m off caffeine. Probably forever.”

  “That’ll last until the morning.” She gave him a good, long look. “Take me home, Shane.”

  As the hot desert wind stirred bones and ashes, and the fire department finally arrived to clean up, they walked back to the house they shared with Michael and Eve.

  Home.

  As Shane lay awake that night, remembering the sick feeling of being possessed by Jane Penwell, he also remembered what she felt. She’d left some of that with him. Regret. Loss. Sadness. Rage.

  He hoped that it would go away. But somehow, he thought it was always going to be part of him now.

  “Hope you found your home,” he whispered to her in the dark.

  He was very happy that the dark didn’t answer back.

  THE DEER WIFE

  Jennifer McMahon

  Loves me

  Loves me not

  Loves me

  Pulling the petals off a black-eyed Susan—one of the last of the season, a flower that has somehow survived the first frost—I play the game. A game I played in the schoolyard years ago with a bunch of other girls to see if little Jamie Coughlan whose daddy owned the Buick dealership might really love me, might want to one day make me his wife, have little babies with me that we’d drive around in the backseat of a big old Park Avenue sedan.

  Only this time, I’m a grown woman and it’s not Jamie Coughlan I�
�m longing for.

  This time, it’s not a game.

  It’s a spell. A conjuring.

  If I do it right, she may come.

  I get to the last petal: Loves me.

  I smile and blush, actually blush, as I bury the stem under leaves and dirt, a small offering.

  There are other things I do, of course. Other ways I can call her.

  I scatter dried corn on the ground in a circle around me. I whisper, “I come in peace, I come with good intentions, I come of my own free will.”

  I pull my little wooden pipe with the long stem from the basket I’ve brought, pack it full of mugwort, mullein, willow bark, wormwood and lavender.

  I sit on a rock in the clearing, the clearing where I first saw her; the place I’ve come to think of as ours. I light the pipe and begin to puff gently, imagining the smoke drawing her in.

  She won’t stay long. Not this late in the season. In the fall, our visits are fewer, shorter, but they burn with a white-hot intensity that comes from knowing that soon it will end. She will be gone for the winter and I won’t see her again until spring. That’s how it is. How it has been for these past four years. I don’t know where she goes or what she does. I don’t know how or where she passes the winter.

  Some things are not for me to know. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  I close my eyes, wishing, willing, summoning her with my whole self. The smoke drifts out in circles around me. Smoke from the herbs she blended, the pipe she gave me as a gift on the summer solstice. The smoke is supposed to calm my mind. To make me more open to the possibilities the world around me holds.

  She’s taught me everything I know about magic: how to cast a circle, to call out to the elements and spirits, to channel all the powers around us. She’s taught me to use herbs, make charms, to cast runes and read cards. She tells me I have a gift for visions; that I am more powerful than I know.

  I hear soft footsteps. Twigs breaking. I feel her near me but don’t dare open my eyes. Not just yet.

  Her coming always brings an intoxicating mix of desire and fear. My heart hammers, my legs start to tremble.

  Run, the logical part of my brain is telling me.

  But it’s too late.

  I feel her breath on my neck.

  Only when she wraps her arms around my waist, nibbles on my ear, do I know what form she’s taken this time.

  “Hello,” I whisper, my body relaxing, melting into hers.

  I keep my eyes shut tight, afraid that if I open them, she just might disappear.

  She’s unpredictable. Here one minute, gone the next.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’ve dreamed her to life; if she’s even real at all.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she says to me now, voice teasing and raspy, like wind scattering dry leaves. She knows I can’t stay away. I’ve tried. I’ve sworn off her a hundred times, promised myself I was done with the whole impossible situation, but again and again I return to this clearing. To her.

  “There is nowhere else I’d rather be,” I say. It’s the only truth I know right now as she gently pulls me from the rock, lays me down on the forest floor, unbuttoning my coat and blouse. Her fingers search, go right for the mark—the tiny dot she inked into the skin just beneath my left breast. She used a sewing needle and tattoo ink she’d made herself: a potion of vodka, herbs and ashes. The mark isn’t anything anyone would even notice—it blends in, looks like a dark freckle. But she put it there. She put it there, she says, so she would always be a part of me.

  * * *

  I know what she is, of course. I know what she’s capable of.

  I’ve always known. I’ve known and I’ve given myself to her entirely anyway. Given myself over to her not in spite of what she is, but because of it.

  I’d heard the stories in town for years before I met her, the warnings not to go into the woods alone because you might meet the witch.

  They say she lives in a cave deep in the heart of the forest. No one has ever found it. They say for a bottle of bourbon or a basket of food, she can hex a man or woman for you, a sure way to get rid of your enemies. Leave her a gift in the forest and a note with your request (heal my sick father, make the girl love me, bring my business back from the brink of bankruptcy) and if the gift is good enough, she’ll do your bidding.

  They say you can’t hear her coming. She moves like the wind. She can read minds. Can see the future when she casts her runes, looks into her scrying bowl.

  She rarely leaves the woods; hasn’t been to a store in years.

  If things go missing around town, it’s the witch who took them.

  A prize pumpkin, a shirt hanging on a clothesline, a cooler of beer, a pair of boots.

  She never takes much, just the things she needs. And you can always tell she’s been because for each thing she takes, she leaves a small gift in its place: a little stick figure, a doll bound up, wrapped in cloth and tied up with string, stuffed full of herbs. A good luck charm.

  Some people say she’s old and ugly.

  Some say she’s more beautiful than any mortal woman should be.

  Some say she’s impossible to see—she can cast a spell of invisibility. Be careful, they warn, looking around nervously, she could be watching us right now.

  They say she has always been here; that she’s a part of the forest. The oldest men in town, the ones who gather for coffee each morning on the porch of the general store—they remember hearing about her when they were little boys. They remember their own fathers warning them to stay out of the woods or the witch would eat them up, build herself a bed with their bones.

  She has killed those who cross her.

  She has scared men to death.

  If you’re out in the woods at night and you hear her song, it’ll be the last sound you ever know.

  But the stories, they’re all half-truths.

  For instance, she does live deep in the woods, but not in a damp cave.

  She has a cabin, a place she has led me to, a place I’ve never been able to find on my own, though I’ve often tried. It’s perfectly hidden in a thick clump of trees. The outside is sheathed with the rounded slabs of rough cut logs, the roof is shingled with tree bark, with moss and lichen growing on top. It blends into the forest perfectly, as if it’s always been there, grown right up alongside the trees. She says she’s cast a circle of protection around the place; an enchantment to make it impossible to see or find unless she’s brought you.

  Inside it’s warm and cozy and smells like herbs and woodsmoke with something else underneath it; her smell—an earthy scent with hints of warm fur and damp clay, bitter roots, the lake after a rainstorm. There’s a cast-iron stove she uses for heat and cooking, a bed, a table with one chair, some hooks on the wall for her clothes. She doesn’t own much (and most of what she owns, she’s taken from other people’s houses and camps—another piece of truth from the rumors). She has a frying pan, a saucepan, a good knife, a single bowl and plate, one fork and spoon. When we eat together, we share the same bowl, the same spoon. We feed each other, using the spoon, and our hands. Her exquisite fingers brush against my lips, drop berries on my tongue; she kisses the juice as it dribbles down my chin.

  She gets her water from the stream, says it’s perfectly safe to drink. She has an outhouse behind her cabin that’s tidier than the bathrooms in most people’s homes. It’s got a skylight and a painting of the full moon on the inside of the door.

  There are shelves in her kitchen lined with glass jars full of roots, herbs, berries—things she’s gathered in the woods. There are other things too—metal tins of tea, coffee and tobacco, a bottle of brandy, dried beans, cornmeal and flour. Things she’s taken or gifts people have left for her.

  I’ve seen the desperate, pleading notes people leave here and there in the forest.

  Please, Witch, please, Aunt Sally’s got cancer real bad again and she’s the only one who can take care of Gram and Joey so please make her well. She’s a good person and doesn’t d
eserve this and we all love her and need her. Here’s a pie, a bottle of gin, my grandpa’s old silver cigarette lighter and some fresh flints and fuel for it. I hope it’s enough.

  She enjoys the gifts. Some people she helps. Some, she laughs at with a cruelty that makes me go cold.

  Sometimes, she gets a request that she can do nothing with.

  There are things, she explains, that are outside of her control.

  I ask her if I’m under her control.

  “Don’t be silly,” she says with a wry smile. “You come of your own free will.”

  * * *

  “Can you turn me?” I ask. We’re back at her cabin and she’s at the old wooden table, mixing up the special potion she uses to change: an ointment made from animal fat, deer fur, her own hair, wolfsbane, hemlock, jimson weed, fly agaric mushroom. I’ve watched her make it many times. I’ve seen her make the change, know the words she uses, that ancient incantation.

  “Turn you?”

  “Can you change me? Like you change yourself.”

  She looks at me, her irises such a dark shade of brown that they nearly blend with her pupils.

  “No,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because once I do it, there’s no going back. It’s a sort of splitting. The human world… it won’t be the same to you after.”

  “What if I’ve had enough of the human world?”

  She frowns, her face folding into sadness for just a split second. Then she shakes her head and looks away from me. “You have things holding you there. You have your son.”

  * * *

  “Where were you today?” Levi asks, accusing and suspicious. He has just come in the door of our tiny house, a cold evening breeze following him in. “I came home for lunch and you weren’t here.”

  My back is to him. I am at the kitchen table chopping potatoes, the freshly sharpened knife moving through the pale yellow flesh with ease, the cutting board slick with starchy juice.