by Alice Bello
He’d been petrified before he could get a shot off.
Two werewolves turned to stone. One a pile of rubble. Both seemed pretty dead. Simple cold fear welled up from her stomach, and Lucy’s heart pounded in her chest as she backed carefully into the house once more, kicking the door closed, and throwing the lock again.
Turned to stone... was Medusa slithering around outside? Had her personal anti-fan-club sent a freaking gorgon to dispatch her?
Okay... she needed help. Big time help. Maybe the Marines...
She moved to the wall phone right beside the stairs leading to the second story. She picked it up and got no dial tone for her effort. They’d cut the phone. Shit! But then Lucy had a cell phone in her purse... she’d left the purse on the kitchen table when she’d come home.
She stepped back from the wall phone and turned to head off to the kitchen. A woman stood in the middle of her grandmother’s living room. She was short, petite, and she had gorgeous red hair that washed over her shoulders in crimson waves. She was dressed all in black—a silk blouse, black jeans, and a black leather jacket. All hugged her ample curves.
Lucy had seen her before. “You work at the dress shop.”
Red showed Lucy her teeth, a purely predatory expression. “Not really.”
When in doubt and scared out of your mind, be a smart ass. It had served her well in the past. “So you’re dropping the dress off? Boy, that’s dedication.”
Red pursed her lips, and then shook her head. “Not here to deliver a dress.” She held up a glass of water and a tiny doll wearing a white wedding gown. Lucy blinked and squinted. The doll had mahogany hair like hers, and the dress was freaking identical to the one she’d just had fitted earlier that day.
That can’t be good...
“Guns, knives, axes... ” Red clucked her tongue. “My competition has no imagination. Just because magic seems to roll off you like water, doesn’t mean one should just throw caution to the wind and go all axe murderer.” She dangled the wedding dress clad effigy over the glass of water.
“I fashioned this with that hair I plucked off your dress... remember?”
Yep, Lucy remembered. She’d thought what a nice gesture. Now it made her blood run cold. She’d been so close, and still Lucy hadn’t had the slightest clue how close to death she was.
She shot the woman her most ferocious smile. “What, you going to stick a freaking pin in it?”
The red haired woman smiled, and then dropped the doll in the glass of water.
It was instantaneous. Lucy gasped as she felt the icy water engulf her, and then she suddenly couldn’t breathe anymore. Everything seemed to slowdown, the air around her turning to freezing, thick goop. Her feet slipped out from under her, but she didn’t fall to the floor. Instead, she slowly floated up close to the ceiling, bobbing up and down as if she were in deep water.
“See?” the woman said. “Imagination... now isn’t this so much nicer than meeting your death at the end of a knife or a gun?” She looked down upon the glass of water in her hand with fondness, and then set it on the coffee table next to Lucy’s can of Diet Coke. The witch plucked a kernel of popcorn out of the bowl and popped it into her mouth and dusted her fingers off dramatically. “No muss, no fuss... and no blood to clean up after. Really, you should be thanking me.”
Lucy’s lungs betrayed her, burning, constricting and heaving, trying to pull in breath. But no air would come. This witch’s magic was going to drown her... or smother her... it didn’t really matter which it was. She’d be dead all the same.
She thrashed her arms and legs, trying to free herself of this watery grave. But nothing happened, and her lungs burned all the more. Her body grew numb, and the world was starting to go dark.
Something moved beside the red haired witch, and the woman shrieked and spun about, clutching at her head. Standing about twenty feet away, Abbey held a long, thin chunk of red hair in her hands, her fingers working it.
“What do you think you’re...” the witch gasped when Abbey held up the hair, which she’d fashioned into a noose of sorts, and a heartbeat later, a cigarette lighter. A Zippo already burning and held precariously close the lock of hair.
“Let her out of your little voodoo trap,” Abbey said flatly. Her face was gaunt, and her eyes were about as flat and lifeless as her tone. “Or you burn.”
The red haired witch shook her head, her eyes wild, but then seemed to gain control of herself. “That will never work!”
Abbey passed the hair over the flame, just for a second. The woman let out a scream that made Lucy jerk.
The world was getting darker and darker...
The witch held her blistered arm to her chest, panting in pain.
Abbey shook the lock of hair closer to the flame of the Zippo.
“Okay, okay... ” the witch gasped in agony. “I’ll release her.”
“Now,” Abbey said in a low growl.
Oh god, oh god... I’m not going to...
The woman reached over and pulled the doll from the icy water: Lucy fell to the floor, gasping for breath.
“Get out and leave the doll,” Abbey said, an icy edge to her words. Lucy saw shadows caress her friend like the hands of a lover. They even blotted out the pretty, green irises of Abbey’s eyes.
The witch hissed, clutching her arm closer to her. “I’m not leaving without my hair.”
Abbey smiled. It was wrong in so many ways. Lucy didn’t even recognize the frightening young woman before her.
“Then a trade.” Abbey stalked closer to the red headed witch.
The witch backed away and hunched her shoulders
“Your hair in exchange for Lucy’s doll.”
“Don’t trust her,” Lucy gasped. “She turned the guards to stone.”
“I saw,” Abbey said in an appraising tone, yet her eyes never left the red haired witch. “But I think we understand each other, don’t we?”
“We do,” rasped the witch.
They moved slowly together until they were close enough to touch, and then they snatched away what was in each other’s hands, backing away from each other in a rush.
The woman retreated carefully all the way to the front door, out over the porch, and then slowly down the steps. She tripped on the rubble that was once Pam the werewolf, yet didn’t fall.
“By the way, stupid little girl!” the witch called out. “A real witch doesn’t need some chunk of hair to work her will.”
“Doesn’t she?” Abbey stood there, staring serenely at the witch. That’s when Lucy felt it, slithering out like the tendrils of some enormous, poisonous plant: deep, dark magic—malignant and hungry, the magic of death.
It flickered hot and dark like Lucy’s own. But this power didn’t just want to reach out to death, it wanted to cause it.
“Thanks for the tip,” Abbey said, cocking her head at an angle. Her eyes were pitch black, like molten tar.
The woman screamed, smoke smoldered from her flesh a split second before that flesh burst into flames. The witch screamed in horrifying wails, clawing at the air as flames licked over her arms, consuming her chest, slithering down her legs, and engulfing her face. Even her long red waves of hair caught fire, dripping in fiery clumps to the sidewalk. She screamed and she screamed, until her legs buckled and she crumbled in large bits to the pitiless ground.
Chapter 9
Lucy stood on the front porch of her grandmother’s house, and looked down on what was left of the wicked witch of the bridal gown boutique. It wasn’t much, and except for a large chunk of ashy carbon that was the left half of the woman’s face, it didn’t look much like it had ever been human.
Abbey came up behind Lucy and wrapped a throw blanket over her shoulders. Lucy was shaking, but she didn’t think it was from the cold.
This has to stop, she told herself. There had been four attempts on her life in the last three days. How had her life gotten so ridiculously screwed up? And not only had her would-be murderers been both human an
d very, very much not human, but she’d just watched her best friend charbroil the latest assassin like a hunk of beef on an episode of The Iron Chef.
It was all so very disturbing...
And in a sick, twisted kind of way, comforting.
Though the look on Abbey’s face when she’d set the other witch on fire had been one of the scariest things she’d ever seen—homicidal vampires and axe wielding lunatics included—the fact that her best friend not only had her back in a quite literal way, and she was powerful enough to actually protect her, was just a life saver.
Lucy didn’t so much as shudder as Abbey pulled her away from the sight of the burned up witch and crumbled pieces of the bodyguard team that had been protecting her that night. She led Lucy back into Gram’s house and sat her down on the couch, reaching over and changing the channel to—of all things—Project Runway.
“I don’t think I want to look at another dress… ever again.”
Abbey eyed her suspiciously and then patted her gently on the shoulder. “She was a Wiccan assassin, cold and deadly as a snake... but she had very good taste.”
Lucy looked at her incredulously. “You’ve seen the dress?”
Abbey shook her head and smiled. “No, silly. I was referring to the outfit she was wearing when I burned her to a cinder. Very smooth lines.”
Lucy shook her head. Smooth lines? The woman had been wearing—to Lucy’s dismay—a stunning strappy silk Dior dress with a matching satin and lace wrap. She did indeed have exquisite taste...
But how the hell did Abbey Adams—life long Goth-chick and anarchist—learn about such a thing as sophisticated fashion style?
“Who are you and what have you done with my best friend?”
Abbey beamed, her smile turning wide, and her eyes glowing. Then she affected a false frown and raised her chin haughtily. “I can have layers, you know!”
Lucy fell over and laid her head on Abbey’s shoulder. Spooky and powerful as hell, it was so very, very nice to have an actual best friend.
It was so very nice.
~*~
Lillian couldn’t believe the chaos and disarray she found surrounding her home when she returned from church. There were werewolves all over her property, and chunks of stone and ash littering the walkway leading up to her porch.
And there was a scorch mark on her walkway that looked as if a fireball the size of a refrigerator had fallen on it.
To her relief she found her granddaughter unscathed, though shaky. She also found her neighbor’s trifling granddaughter in her kitchen as well, brewing up some tea to help calm Lucy’s nerves.
She’d been ready to pull her by the ear out of the house and throw her over the fence to her grandmother’s property... but then she realized that it had been the young witch who had saved her granddaughter from a rather nasty demise.
For that, she was truly in the young woman’s debt. But she could feel the dark magics smoldering off of the girl’s thin body from across the room. Whatever she had done last year in that god forsaken graveyard with Lucy had seriously opened her up to a frightening amount of power.
And Lillian could practically read the waves of blood deep power that accounted for the girl’s aura. It was red, and smudged with pitch black.
Lillian shook her head and decided that dangerous or wicked—or not—the girl serving her granddaughter tea had been the only thing that had kept Lucy alive. And it had been the second time she’d done it in three days.
That had to count for something.
So she shook all her concerns from her troubled mind and walked over to give Abbey Adams a long, tight hug. Abbey gasped and made a small sobbing sound, but soon pulled her arms around Lillian as well.
“Thank you for saving my Lucy,” she said, her voice cracking.
“She’d save me right back if I needed saving.”
Lillian smiled at the young woman’s answer. “Indeed she would.”
~*~
Later that night, after the werewolves had cleaned up the debris from the witch’s attack, Lucy and Lila and Seth had all gone to bed, Lillian made herself a fresh pot of coffee and went outside to sit quietly on her front porch swing in the dark.
She loved having her house full of her family again, and she would never, ever want to go back to her lonely old hermit ways again.
But there were times when she deeply yearned to have her house all back to herself again.
So a little quiet alone time was a godsend.
There was a mockingbird in the small outcrop of trees toward the back of her property, near the little graveyard. Its song was lovely... as long as it didn’t come any closer to the house. If Lillian had to contend with its song up close and personal while she tried to sleep, she would be breaking out her old pellet gun and there would be one less of god’s creatures singing.
She took a sip of her cooling coffee, and then took a deep satisfied breath. She wished her granddaughter didn’t have to fight for her life, but she would have had to learn to take care of herself sooner or later. One can not possess a power like Lucy’s without attracting the attentions of some fairly scary things.
But between Lucy’s werewolf fiancé and the unexpected might and cleverness of her witch best friend, Lillian felt that her granddaughter would end up getting through almost anything.
She heard the deliberate snap of a twig off to her right. She closed her eyes and let her weak magical senses ease out over the land, and felt him standing only a few feet away from the side of her porch.
She sighed, pushing her concerns for her granddaughter out of her head. She had her own problems to contend with.
“You know,” she began, “it isn’t polite to stalk your host in the night.”
Suddenly Jonas Enoch appeared at the bottom of her porch steps. She smiled wanly as he moved up them. “I didn’t know we were on polite terms.”
“You were just to dinner in my home a few nights ago.” She pulled her eyes away. He looked a few years older than he had that long ago night, but not by much. She hadn’t realized that he’d still look so young. Though she’d known it all too well on that night when she’d left him.
“You know what I mean,” he said laconically.
Lillian let her head fall back and she looked up to the ceiling of the porch, where the old swing was bolted in. So the handsome bastard was going for the direct approach.
“You’re a werewolf.”
“What does that have to—?”
Lillian raised her head and gave him a level look. “Look at me, and then look at yourself... or your lovely wife. I think you’ll find my point most obvious.”
He snarled. “But you’ll allow your own granddaughter to become one of us?”
“She will never be one of you!” Lillian snapped.
Jonas’ eyes smoldered with pain. “Are we that disgusting to you?”
Lillian looked away, holding her now cold coffee. “No, Jonas... but she will never become a werewolf, or a were-anything. She is a necromancer by blood. Infection with lycanthropy is impossible.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jonas said impatiently. “But still she will age as you age.”
Lillian looked at him and then out into the night around him. “I can’t be certain about anything when it comes to Lucy... she has more of the gift in her than I ever had, or my mother. It has changed her already, and she has only been using its power over the last few months.”
Jonas was silent for a moment.
“I deserve an explanation,” he snarled, taking a step closer.
Lillian looked him right in the eye and shook her head. “You deserve the happiness you found with your wife and your children. You deserve the thrill of the hunt, and the loyalty of your subjects, wolf king.” She took a deep breath and put iron into her voice. “But you do not deserve to know the inner workings of my heart and mind... not after a single night forty years ago.”
He took a breath to argue, but stumbled over his first words, letting out that
breath in a defeated sigh.
“Now go home.” Lillian looked away into the night. “I’d like to be alone.”
~*~
Seth couldn’t sleep. He knew something big had happened as soon as he came home from the mall. There were a dozen of Gabriel’s men prowling around the house, and some of them were reverently putting chunks of rubble into what looked like body bags.
There was another of Gabriel’s men sucking up something else in a freaking hand held Dirt Devil, emptying it occasionally into a trashcan.
His Gram had told him nothing was wrong, that there had just been a small industrial accident—wedding related—and Gabriel and his men were there just to clean it up.
Gabriel’s brother, Micah, hadn’t been there. Seth had looked all over for him, his chest pounding with excitement. He would be eighteen in only a few days—he wouldn’t be surprised that his birthday was completely forgotten, with all the wedding nonsense and all. But he preferred for his family to ignore him.
It wasn’t that he was hiding what he was... well, not very hard. He just didn’t know enough about how he felt, or who he really was to know what to tell anyone else—especially his mom and grandmother.
He wouldn’t have to worry about telling his father. Adam Hart had stopped caring about him years ago. It was as if the big man could just tell his son was different, and unlike some fathers you see in movies, that go over the edge and make their offspring’s lives miserable, or go over the edge trying to “straighten” them out, his father had just casually stared ignoring him.
No one had even noticed it... but Seth had. The first time he missed a choir concert. The first time he didn’t show for a baseball game. The first time his Christmas presents from his father hadn’t had his handwriting on them, but his mother’s.
