by L.H. Cosway
Thinking it was probably Rita, I went to answer it. It wasn’t Rita though. A well-dressed lady stood on the doorstep. She looked to be in her late sixties, and she had really weird hair. It was split down the middle, with one side jet black and the other silvery grey.
“I’m here for Ira Wolf,” she said, eyeing me up and down.
I eyed her up and down right back, folding my arms as I leaned against the doorjamb. “Oh yeah, and who are you?” I wasn’t normally so rude to strangers, but this woman had a haughty attitude, and it put me on the defensive.
“Do not test me, girl. I’m here for Ira. Bring him to me and there won’t be any trouble.”
“Listen, lady, I’m not doing anything for you until you tell me who you are and what you want with Ira.”
She sighed and flicked her long, two-toned hair over her shoulder. She wore an expensive wool coat, black leather boots with severely pointed toes, and dark green leather gloves. Glancing past me and into the house, she called out, “Ira! I know you’re in there. Come out here and face me.”
Seconds later, Ira filled the doorway behind me, emanating pure anger as he glared at the woman. “Emilia,” he growled.
Emilia? Oh wow. This was the witch who cursed him all those years ago. So much for her suffering her under own curse. In fact, she didn’t look like she’d suffered a day in her life. She looked pampered and rich. I couldn’t believe she had the gall to show up like this.
“I knew my spell was broken. I could feel it, but I was out of the country when it happened. I traced your presence to this house. This is the first occasion I’ve had to come and see for myself.”
“I hate to break it to you,” I interjected. “But I think you’re the last person Ira wants to see right now. What you did to him is beyond the pale. How can you even live with yourself?”
She barely spared me a glance, her eyes seeking out Ira. “Tell this rude child to leave us. I want to talk.”
“Eh, I’m not a child and you’re not talking to him. Now go piss off back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”
She glared at me, her nostrils flaring. Then quite boldly, she moved to walk past me and right into the house. Oh, the absolute cheek! Now I was pissed. My magic bubbled up, and my arm whipped out. Sparks flew from my palm and knocked her flat on her backside.
“How could you possibly …” she breathed, trailing off. She wasn’t looking at Ira anymore. Now she was looking at me with a mixture of fear and fascination.
“Walk away, witch,” I said, holding my hand up as a threat of more to come if she didn’t get the hell off Finn’s doorstep in the next five seconds.
“No, no, you don’t understand. You shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“Oh yeah, and why not?” I shot back, thinking she was going to say something like, Because you’re only a human.
But that wasn’t what she said. Instead, she replied, “Because the only witches who possess that particular form of defence are those from my bloodline. I know every member of my family, and I have never seen your face before in my life.”
“You’re lying,” I said, suspicious now. Was this some sneaky tactic to get past me and put another spell on Ira? My stomach tensed at the same time my magic did a weird fluttery thing in my chest. It felt nice, actually. It felt like my magic recognised this woman and was pleased to see her, which didn’t make a lick of sense.
“I’m telling you the truth. My name is Emilia Petrovsky, but my maiden name was Dragu. Only the Dragu women can wield electrical fire from the palms of their hands.”
She raised her hand to me, and the same sparks flew out. The name Petrovsky rang a bell, and I remembered Noreen telling me of the magical family, the Petrovskys, and how she thought my mother might be the daughter of Filipp, the one who disappeared. Ira mentioned something about Emilia’s husband being overly protective of his daughter while his wife went about having affairs behind his back. The family had needed extra protection against vampires, he’d said. Was that because those vampires wanted to get their hands on their daughter’s blood?
I almost felt like being sick as the pieces fell into place. This woman—this witch—could possibly be my grandmother. My grandmother cursed Ira. I didn’t want to believe it, but it made so much sense, especially with how my magic almost seemed to preen at the sight of her.
“What’s your husband’s name?” I asked her quietly.
“Filipp,” she answered sadly. “He passed away a number of years ago.” Her eyes narrowed as she studied me. “I hadn’t noticed before, but you have my daughter’s eyes. Who are you, child?”
“What was your daughter’s name?”
“Darya.”
“Fuck.”
“That sort of language is very unbecoming,” Emilia scolded. God, she really was my grandmother.
A warm hand touched my shoulder. “What’s wrong, Tegan?” Ira asked, standing close behind me.
I winced as I turned and looked up at him. Gesturing to Emilia, I said, “I think she might be my grandmother.”
“Your grand-what?” Emilia exclaimed.
I glanced over at her. “You heard me. Your daughter Darya was my mother.”
“That can’t be. Darya never had a daughter. She was kidnapped and killed before she even turned twenty.”
“She wasn’t kidnapped. She ran away. At least that’s what I think happened. She died when I was little. I never had the chance to learn about her past.”
“Ran away …” Emilia said, shaking her head in disbelief. She took a slow step toward me and reached out to grab my hand. I wasn’t sure why I let her, but I did.
Emilia’s grip tightened as she closed her eyes. Her eyelids flickered fast like some kind of accelerated REM. Something deep inside me said she was using magic to read me, to determine if what I claimed was the truth. A minute later, she opened her eyes and gasped, “It’s true. And you are exactly like my daughter, too. You possess the same power in your blood.”
I pulled my hand away from her now.
“You must invite me inside. We have many things to discuss,” she went on.
“Hold up a second,” I said, blocking her from coming in. “We might be related, but as far as I’m concerned, we have nothing to say to one another. If what Ira’s told me about you is correct, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”
My granny was a serial cheater. Wasn’t that just delightful? Not only that, but she was so bad at handling rejection that she cursed the man who refused her.
“I was young and impulsive when Ira knew me,” Emilia said. “Drunk on power. I’m not the same woman I was back then.”
“People don’t change that much, and you weren’t that young.” She had to have been what? In her early forties twenty-five years ago? That was certainly old enough to know better.
“You must believe me,” she pleaded. “I didn’t come here to bespell Ira again. I came to apologise. I’d completely forgotten about what I did to him until recently when I felt that the curse had been broken.”
“You forgot? How many people do you go around cursing that you could just forget? Ira was a young man with his whole life ahead of him, and you stole that from him just because he turned you down.”
Her gaze was beseeching, but she had another thing coming if she thought I was going to invite her inside for some long-lost family bonding.
“Darya disappeared not long after I cursed Ira,” Emilia explained then. “Many dark years followed for myself and my husband. Anything that happened previous to that faded into the background, became meaningless. All we thought about was our missing daughter.”
At this, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw Finn’s name. I held a hand up to Emilia. “Wait here. I need to take this.” I closed the door, shooting Ira an apologetic look as I lifted the phone to my ear and answered, “Hey.”
“I have Pamphrock here,” Finn said. “He wants to speak to you.”
Why did Pamphrock want to speak to me
? I heaved a sigh. “Okay, put him on.”
A second later Pamphrock came on the line. “Tegan, you are aware of the trip I made last night?”
“Yeah, Finn explained.”
“Well, I now possess a vial of Felicity’s blood for the spell. I would like to move forward with this as soon as possible. Have you figured out the other components yet?”
I scratched nervously at my neck. “Um, not quite.”
“Not quite?” he clipped, displeased.
“Not quite, b-but soon,” I stammered, lying through my teeth.
“How soon? How many more days do you need?”
“Um, a couple.”
“You have three days. I expect results by then,” he said sternly before hanging up. Rude.
Emilia rapped her knuckles on the door. “What spell are you planning?” she asked, clearly having been listening in. She probably used some kind of eavesdropping magic because she’d clearly heard Pamphrock’s end, too.
I threw the door open. “You listened to my phone call?”
“Only part of it. You sounded distressed, and I grew worried. The man you spoke with wants you to cast a spell for him, but you’re not yet sure if you can achieve it. I could help you,” she offered.
I cocked an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? And what do you want in return?”
“All I ask is that you allow me a chance to get to know you. I am an old woman who had her daughter taken from her. Only now do I discover that this daughter wasn’t taken but instead ran away of her own choice. Not only that, but she had a daughter herself. I have a granddaughter, and I want to get to know her.”
I stared at her, gaze narrowed. “I don’t trust you.”
“And I would never expect you to. But please, allow me the opportunity to gain your trust.”
I didn’t reply right away, because I needed a minute to think. My mother performed the same spell on me that I needed to perform on Rebecca. If my mother learned magic from Emilia, then perhaps she was exactly the person I needed right now. With this realisation, I turned to face Ira.
Taking his large hand into mine, I said, “If I agree to what she’s asking she’s going to be hanging around here for a while. She might be my grandmother, but it’s your life she stole. If you don’t want her here, then just say the word and I’ll tell her to leave.”
Ira looked over my shoulder at Emilia. “Did you really come to apologise?”
“I did,” she answered immediately. “I meant what I said about not being the woman I was back then. I now see the error of my ways. You don’t know how sorry I am for my selfish actions.”
His eyes returned to me, but he didn’t speak yet. I wondered if forgiving people for their sins was a part of Buddhism the same way it was a part of Christianity. “You think she can help with your spell for Rebecca?” he asked.
“There’s a good chance she can,” I replied truthfully.
“Then you should agree to work with her. Protecting that little girl is what matters.”
I squeezed his hand. I knew allowing this was a big deal for him. I tried to show how grateful I was with my eyes. When I let go of his hand, I turned to address Emilia. “You say you’ve changed, but I’ll believe that when I see it. I’ll let you work with me on the spell, but if you try to do anything to Ira again, I’ll kill you myself.”
“You would kill your grandmother?” she questioned, raising her eyebrows.
“If she turned out to be an evil, backstabbing bi—I mean, witch,” I said, my slip intentional. “Then yes, I would, without hesitation.”
She studied me now. “You have Darya’s eyes, her hair, too, but it seems that is where the similarity ends. Darya was a gentle creature. You are tough, like old boots.”
“Old boots are survivors. I’ll take that as a compliment,” I quipped.
Before she could reply, a man dressed in a chauffeur getup walked up the driveway and whispered in Emilia’s ear. It was only after seeing him that I noticed the fancy black Mercedes Benz sitting out on the road.
She nodded to the chauffeur, and he returned to the car. “I have an engagement I’m late for, but I’ll come to see you at lunchtime tomorrow, if that suits, and you can tell me all about this spell you endeavour to cast.”
I gave non-committal shrug, still not too keen on having anything to do with her. Working on the spell with Emilia was for Rebecca’s benefit. I had no intention of becoming close to the woman who cursed Ira. Speaking of whom, she turned her attention back to him before she left. “It’s good to see you whole again, Mr Wolf. My word, you really haven’t aged a day. It’s a marvel.”
“I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you,” Ira replied, and his tone was so casual it took me a second to register the insult. I felt like giving him a high five for that one. It wasn’t like Emilia didn’t deserve it.
Her face hardened slightly, but she seemed to accept that she probably deserved far worse treatment from Ira after what she did. She inclined her head, turned on her heel, and walked to the Mercedes, sliding gracefully into the back seat.
“There’s never a dull day around here,” I said, hands on my hips as I watched my long-lost grandmother drive away.
“It’s this city. There are too many supernatural creatures here. It’s a big place, but not big enough to contain them all,” Ira said.
“Makes a person feel like moving to a remote cabin in the woods.”
“True,” he smiled. “So now you know who your grandmother is.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I kind of wish I didn’t.”
11.
Throughout the rest of the day, I found myself slipping my hand inside my pocket to fiddle with Edwards’s coin. I grew paranoid that he wouldn’t be able to locate me unless I was touching it.
I was going to drive myself insane with all this fretting.
Ethan didn’t come over to the house once it got dark, which made me wonder if he felt too ill to venture out. I felt like going over and checking on him, but I wasn’t sure if he’d want to see me. Finn brought Thai food home, and we all sat down together to eat, while I recounted what had happened earlier in the day with Emilia.
“Emilia Petrovsky came here?” Noreen asked in awe.
“She wanted to apologise to Ira. When I used my magic to block her from entering the house, she recognised my sparks as a skill that only the women in her family possess. She called it electrical fire. That’s how I ended up figuring out she was my grandmother.”
Noreen wore a thoughtful expression. “If she’s returning tomorrow, you need to be wary of her. She might claim to have turned over a new leaf, but you have to know that you’re dealing with a witch renowned throughout the city for her underhandedness and cruelty. There’s a rumour that she once had a servant killed simply for stealing a few pieces of jewellery.”
I rubbed at my forehead, feeling a headache coming on. “Seriously?” I didn’t know whether to be more disgusted by the fact that she killed a servant or that she actually kept servants to begin with. My granny was a cruel tyrant. As if I needed more trouble in my life.
“The magical families are very old fashioned,” Gabriel said. “Some of them like to think of themselves as superior beings, sort of like royalty.”
“And that’s why they go around acting like Henry VIII,” Rita said, biting at a nail. It was a bad habit of hers, something she tended to do when she was anxious. I made a mental note to ask her how she was feeling. If she sensed Theodore trying to make contact with her again.
“The main thing to do is watch her,” Gabriel went on. “If she really does just want to get to know her granddaughter, then that’s great. It could be useful to have her as an ally. However, if she’s not all that she seems, the consequences could be dire. You’ve seen how she cursed Ira with barely a second thought. People who don’t have a conscience like that are nasty work. They don’t care who they hurt.”
For the rest of the night, Gabriel’s warning rang in my ears. If it wasn’t one thing I was worried a
bout, it was another. I was going to end up giving myself a nervous breakdown. Before getting into bed, I placed Edwards’s coin on my nightstand in the hopes that I’d wake up tomorrow morning and Dad would be here.
***
I opened my eyes to see light streaming through a gap in the curtains. Edwards’s coin remained on my nightstand, unmoved. Disappointment took hold, and I began to wonder if he really would return come hell or high water like he said he would. What if he lost track of time over there and ended up being gone for years and years?
Forcing myself to stop thinking such morose thoughts, I showered and got dressed, finding that Finn and Ira had already gone to the DOH compound for training. I went out to the RV and filled Rita in on the situation with Rebecca’s spell, knowing I could trust her with the secret. Rita agreed to sit with me during Emilia’s visit, since I didn’t want to face her alone.
Rita brought in a few basic spell ingredients for us to work with. “If we need anything else, I can go back out to the RV and get it,” she said. “After our trip to the magic market the other day our cupboards are stocked to the gills.”
At exactly one o’clock a knock sounded at the front door, setting my nerves on edge. I tried to calm down, telling myself that even though Emilia was powerful, Rita and I would be able to take her on if worse came to worse.
I hoped.
Rita motioned for me to let her in while she took a seat at the head of the kitchen table and clasped her hands together. She was wearing even more black eyeliner than usual, and her lacy black dress made her look like Morticia Addams reborn.
I wore my usual T-shirt, jeans, and boots, which might’ve been a subconscious effort to piss Emilia off. I sensed she was the type who thought women should dress all classy and sophisticated. If Dita Von Teese was a granny, she’d probably look exactly like Emilia Petrovsky.
I opened the door, and she came sauntering into the house in a fitted dark blue pencil skirt and a silky blazer with fur trim. Her half-black, half-grey hair was up in an immaculate French twist. Just as I’d expected, she immediately gave my outfit the once over, her lips tightening with disapproval. It brought me a little rush of victory.
