Glancing at them in the rearview mirror, I asked, "What's all gone? Or not all gone? What aren't you telling me?"
"Pay attention to your driving," Gran advised and her tone was cooler than normal.
I couldn't get anything more out of them as they huddled over the photo on my phone and speculated what type of demon might have left such a mark.
“We’re not looking at some low-level Fury, here. It takes a fair amount of power to do that type of a binding.” Mag’s voice dipped so low I could barely hear the next words she spoke. “This sigil reminds me of when family crests were popular. That means it’s one of the old ones, and that’s doubly bad for us.”
If they were practically whispering, I knew I should listen harder and so I did.
Gran muttered, “Demons don’t bind souls, or take them from the living. They have the common decency at least, to wait until after death to harvest. And they don’t associate with Raythes. It would be like owning a pizza place and buying from your competition.”
“Clarie, you’re dimmer than a box of blown light bulbs if you buy that steaming pile of horse manure. Do you also still believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or that they didn’t find anything fishy on the dark side of the moon? Come on, if the American government can convince the people everything’s hunky dory, imagine what a faction of ancient demons might be doing behind closed doors. Wake up and smell the conspiracy, Sis.”
I didn’t know what a Raythe might be, and I only understood about half of the words coming out of their mouths the rest of the ride home. But I'm no fool, and filing away as much as I could, I pretended I hadn't heard a thing.
If they thought I wasn’t going to get answers to my questions—especially the ones I didn’t have enough knowledge to formulate right now—they had another think coming. I was not content with my brand as “uninformed newbie,” and I would not be kept in the dark any longer.
The fact that I believed I could get either of them to do what I wanted them to do if it wasn’t what they wanted to do in the first place just goes to show how much of a newbie I really was.
Chapter Fourteen
BACK AT THE HOUSE, I went upstairs to change, stashed the chilled pendant in a box with a shiver, and headed back downstairs to join in the discussion of what to do next. More research, exactly what I’d feared. Here I’d thought being a witch would come with some cool perks like, I don’t know, practicing magic. Instead, I wound up perched on a hard wooden chair surrounded by massive leather-bound volumes while my elders went about their business.
“Oh, look” Pyewacket stretched to pull another sizable tome from a shelf. “This is a compendium of demon glyphs.” I’m not into women, but even I couldn’t help admiring the lines of her when she reached up high. A dancer’s lithe figure paired with naturally bronzed skin and silky hair made for a lethal combination.
“Dude, roll your tongue back up, no woman appreciates a drooler,” I warned Salem in a whisper.
“Huh? What?” Poor thing, he had it bad. “I’m just going to help with the search,” and with that, he wandered off toward the object of his current obsession. The next time I looked, they were curled up on the sofa in a ball of black and tawny fur.
“What exactly is this Raythe thing you two keep whispering about?” I finally asked during a lull in the tinkling noises coming from Mag’s work station. “And stop trying to shield me from whatever you consider unpleasant. If I’ve got a right to be part of the coven, then you should be able to be candid with me.”
Mag shrugged and tossed a glance at Gran, “I happen to agree with Lexi.”
“Fine,” Clara threw her hands up in the air, “you tell it since you’re the authority.”
My aunt abandoned her experiments, and we all settled into more comfortable accommodations in the form of a pair of Victorian-era settees positioned catty-corner to the Balefire hearth.
“You’ve heard the term null, I imagine. Witches and wizards born without power?”
“Um, yeah, I sort of was one.” I reminded Mag.
“You obviously had power, you just hadn’t unlocked it yet,” Mag rolled her eyes, “but I’m talking about daughters and sons descended from powerful magical lines, yet somehow devoid of any magical abilities of their own. It’s not common, and some of us believe the phenomenon stems from the efforts of certain branches of the first families who wanted to control the more powerful blood lines.”
Bile burned the back of my throat as I realized what she meant, “You mean incest, don’t you? So many icks.” I pushed the image of my disgusting half-brother back into a dark corner of my mind and wondered what I’d done to deserve being grossed out this many times in the course of one evening.
“Yes, exactly. You can probably imagine the dismay when the elitists learned their poo didn’t actually smell like roses.”
“Nice analogy, Mag,” Clara grinned despite the gentle chiding tone.
“I call it like I see it. Anyway, for all the efforts to fortify the bloodlines, there are still witches who, come Awakening day, learn they don’t have enough power in them to levitate a frog.”
“So what do nulls have to do with this—if they have no power, they’re no threat, right?”
Turning in her chair to look at me, Aunt Mag wagged a finger at me. “Right, except for one tiny problem. When a witch and a null love each other very much they...”
“Oh, for Goddess sake, Aunt Mag, I’m familiar with the concept. What happens when a witch gets knocked up by a null? A magic-less male witch.”
“Nice mouth.” She shrugged it off and continued, “They have a null baby.”
“Okay, I’m not seeing the ominous here, it's not an interspecies relationship or anything.”
“You're talking physical genetics, this is magical. The active magic that would have been born to the child—” Mag searched for the right words. “Has nothing to latch onto, and goes rogue, if you will. Born wild, unaligned with the host witch, the wild magic takes physical form and turns on witchkind. We call the creature a Raythe.”
All the hazy pieces of last night’s conversation went crystal clear. “There’s one loose in Port Harbor, and it killed Tansy by eating her soul.” I swallowed hard. It seemed the more I learned about the supernatural world, the more I wondered why I had been so keen to join it in the first place.
“How many others are out there?” It was the exact wrong question to ask given Mag’s response. She turned the air blue with a streak of language not fit to repeat.
“Until now, I thought there were none left alive.” She sighed. “What I’m about to tell you can’t leave this room. Swear on it.” I did. With blood.
“Witches aren’t exactly the most prolific breeders in the world, to begin with, and it’s rare enough for a witch to have a male child, rarer still when a male null is born. There haven’t been all that many in my lifetime.”
“Enough,” Gran bit the word out. “Mag thinks she’s the Raythe slayer.”
Cue the mental image of fluffy-haired old Aunt Mag wearing one of her flowered muumuus, crouched in a fighter’s stance, clutching a stake in each hand while the words: in every generation a slayer is born played in the background. I held back the smirk, but I’m sure my eyes twinkled. For half a second, anyway. This was serious business.
“How do you kill them?”
For the first time since I'd met her, Aunt Mag blushed. “Taste of their own medicine, but that isn’t important right now. With a demon involved, we’re up against a whole other level of predator.”
Standing, I arched my back against the ache from sitting for so long. Plus, the look on Gran's face and the tone in Aunt Mag's voice had me thinking this was information I shouldn't take sitting down.
“So why all the secrecy? You think I can’t handle the thought I might be considered prey? It’s not pleasant, but it’s not exactly novel, either. Everything is prey to something else.”
Gran cut her sister off before she could answer. “This isn’t a typ
ical predator/prey situation. Killing Raythes and releasing the souls they’ve eaten comes at a cost. I’d like to keep my sister from spending more than she already has.”
“What can I do to help? I can’t look at another book, give me something else to do.” I leaned over Gran’s shoulder to take in the contents of the table. There were no potion coated litmus sticks this time, no series of apothecary bottles full of evidence. Only a crystal grid laid out in a spiral pattern with the clearest quartz crystal I’d ever seen anchoring the outside end and a tiger’s eye the size of my fist in the middle.
“Another pair of eyes won’t go amiss. Keep watch now.” At her sister’s nod, Gran tapped her wand three times against the center stone and whispered an incantation in a language I’d never heard before. I heard chimes, and not from the bow this time. I saw mist, sparkling motes of light, and when it cleared, the crystal had grown to form walls and an enclosed top. The whole thing reminded me of a display from seventh-grade science class of a shell sliced in half so you could see the way each chamber created a new part of the spiral path leading to the middle—only this was made from crystal as clear as glass.
Mag leaned in close and blew the gentlest of breaths into the open end. A wisp of the essence she’d taken from the mark on Tansy’s body flowed through the circling pattern until it got to the center and the Balefire chose that moment to have the worst fit so far.
A wall of flames shot toward the ceiling and the magical pressure built so fast it made my ears pop. Enough raw energy pulsed in and around me, I thought I might blow apart if it didn’t stop soon. With a crash and a tinkle, the crystal test enclosure imploded, bursting inward with such force nothing was left except a tiny pile of fine powder. Maybe it was a coincidence that the powder took the shape of a witch’s hat, but I was too shell-shocked to think about it now.
I reeled from the sensation of feeling like I’d been turned inside out, and I wasn’t the only one. If Mag learned anything in the split second before the Balefire’s burst, I never heard about it. We all stumbled out of the fireplace as fast as we could.
“Yuck, I need a shower, but all I want is food. Maybe I can get Terra to cast one of her no-dirt spells on me instead.” I muttered as we ducked back through the sanctum door and became tangled in the sticky strands of a recently-woven spider web. Since the return of the elder witches, Terra had removed her cleaning charms from the area. This was not an improvement in my book.
Aunt Mag grunted, which I was beginning to realize constituted a language in and of itself, and Gran scoffed, “No granddaughter of mine should be forced to run to her faerie godmothers for every little spell. There’s no earthly reason why you can’t perform this one on your own. If you don’t want to smell like musty dust, then do something about it.”
“What about the rule of threes? No magic for personal gain. Doesn’t that count?”
“Pish, posh!” countered Mag. Seriously, she used those exact words, and the phrase didn’t come off quite as charming as it did for Mary Poppins.
“Are you harming anyone else by making your life easier? Do the faeries get slammed with karmic mojo when they make the pots and pans fly around the kitchen or grow us a tree for freshly-squeezed orange juice? Of course not. We’re talking about a little locomotion here.”
The curious look Gran pierced me with implied she’d like to add something along the lines of How did you get to be so uptight?
My gut response was something whiny about not having had a suitable teacher in the house, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Maybe she was right, and I’d been, as usual, over-thinking things.
“I don’t know how.” I raised my hands in defeat. Or maybe shame. And a healthy dose of humility.
Clara grinned, and for a moment it was as if I had caught my own reflection in a mirror. We both get the same glint in our eye when we’re excited, and the lines around our eyes when we smile are nearly identical. If my mother were in the same room, we’d be mistaken for triplets. I think two of us is quite enough, but something told me we’d all be together again at some point, whether the thought scared the pants off me or not.
“Just clear your mind, focus your power into your pointer finger—we’ve got to get you a proper wand—and let your will alter the world around you. Make up a chant or a rhyme if you feel it helps. It’s all the same, just a method of focusing your intent. Once you get a feel for it, you won’t need to speak the spell anymore.”
“Very useful in magical combat.” Mag nodded.
Was that a thing?
“Shhh, Maggie. Let her concentrate. Meet us in the kitchen when you’re clean, Lexi.” Gran smiled encouragingly and forcibly pulled Aunt Mag from the room.
For a solid five minutes, I stood in the doorway, trying to come up with a rhyme at the drop of a hat. The best I could manage was:
Rub-a-dub
Need a scrub
Wash me clean
And nix the tub
Try saying that five times fast.
Turns out, a slow chant works much better. I let my inner power gather in the space beneath my breast, and directed it down my right arm and out through my forefinger. My magic felt heavy at first, as though it were resisting my desires—and then I realized the only thing resisting was me. I had it in my head I shouldn’t do this, even though there was no evidence to support my theory.
As soon as I let go of the notion, power shot out of my fingertip, and a gentle gust of wind began to blow. It caressed my face, tangled in my hair, and raised the peach fuzz on the backs of my arms. Just as suddenly, the wind dissipated, and I felt like a newborn baby, freshly scrubbed. I doubt I had even a speck of dirt hidden beneath my pinkie nail when it was all over.
In the kitchen I found Gran and Mag seated at the island, embroiled in a heated discussion about whether or not it was socially acceptable to wear shoulder pads anymore. I got the sense Mag was tired of this particular argument when she thudded her fists on the counter top and roared, “For the love of the Goddess, Clarie, spring for a new wardrobe! You haven’t spent a cent for twenty-five years.”
“We’ll drink to that!” Terra’s voice floated into the room, and I heard the familiar slosh and clink of a bottle of Twinkleberry wine.
Half a glass of Terra’s home-brewed concoction was enough to send me to a happy place with fluffy, pink clouds crowding all the stressful thoughts out of my head, but not so much I’d end up dancing skyclad on the front lawn. My neighbor, Mrs. Chatterly, got an eyeful of my naked backside on the night of my twenty-first birthday and the two of us haven’t made eye contact since. I’d feel bad about it if she hadn’t elevated hiding behind the curtains and watching my house to an art form.
Does it make me a bad person if I admit I didn’t even make an attempt to warn Gran and Aunt Mag about the potency? Hey, I’m allowed to have a little bit of fun every once in a while, and seeing the two of them with lowered inhibitions was too tempting to pass up.
Terra flicked a finger, and the dining table dressed itself in buttery, cream-colored linens and a display of hand-blown glass stemware I knew had to be worth a fortune. I suppose when you’ve got access to a warehouse full of place settings and the ability to conjure whatever the heck you want, it’s easy to score a grand slam in the home decor department.
I noticed Vaeta’s absence, which had already caused some palpable tension lately but continued to ignore it as I was expected to do. Gran and Aunt Mag followed suit, for which I was grateful. Twinkleberry wine fights are the worst, and I’d prefer not to have another five-alarm blowout if I could possibly help it.
“Cheers!” We all clinked our glasses and took a sip. Aunt Mag let the brew wash over her, and every muscle relaxed. She let out a loud belch, and raised her glass again, “To family. The Goddess has blessed this home, and I’m proud to be surrounded by women like all of you.”
“Hear, hear!” We toasted once more, and I caught Salem rolling his eyes and gesturing to Pye that perhaps it was time for the two of them to ma
ke themselves scarce. One of these days, I’ll get him to drink some Twinkleberry wine, and see what sort of information I can glean from a drunken familiar, but today was not that day.
“We’ll be up in your room watching a movie if you need us,” Salem snagged a few items from the fridge.
By the time Salem and Pye hit the bottom stair, the rest of us were three-quarters of the way through our first glasses, the table had redressed itself for a game of poker, and Mag was shuffling a deck of cards while reciting the Balefire house rules for Deosil Draw.
It didn’t sound much different from Texas Hold’em to me, except for the duels. No buying back, and if you got knocked out of the game, you had to beat the winner of the hand in a magical battle—fail, and you’d spend the rest of the game as an Azurian Muckwalker, which looks a bit like Jabba the Hutt covered in blue slime.
If Deosil Draw was anything like faerie game night, it could last for days. Not a fun prospect for the losers, but it didn’t seem to hamper anyone else’s spirits, so I settled myself in the chair and began organizing my chips into neat stacks.
“Remember the time Roselia Clatterwall cheated, and Mum caught her?” Aunt Mag raised an eyebrow at Clara, who loosed a laugh that shook the entire house.
“How could I forget? By the end of the night, Rosie had turned herself into a Dragolian frog to escape the Muckwalker curse and made it a point to scorch every one of those ugly dining room curtains Mum loved so much. I don’t think she ever forgave Rosie for that.”
“That woman was such a mouse; I didn’t think she had it in her.”
“You’d be surprised. It’s usually the ones you least expect who have the dirtiest secrets.” Gran slurred and chugged back another swallow of wine.
Soleil, who up until now had only exchanged a few abbreviated pleasantries with either of the new(ish) members of our household, clunked her glass down on the table with a bit more force than necessary and leaned in close. “Tell us, Clara, tell us some of the secrets you heard while you were standing in that clearing. We won’t breathe a word, cross our hearts and hope to die.”
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