Bewitching the Dragon

by Jane Kindred

  “What decision? How would he know anything about a decision?”

  “The Covent has ruled on your offenses. You’ve been found guilty of oath-breaking and you’re being formally expelled.”

  Ione blinked at her, utterly blindsided. “What are you talking about? You’re lying. Dev hasn’t even turned in his report.”

  “Dev...that’s Assayer Dharamdev Gideon? Apparently he has. See for yourself.”

  Ione took the folder from her and opened it, her conviction shaken. There was Dev’s signature at the bottom of the typed report.

  It is this assayer’s opinion that Ms. Ione Carlisle has, with full knowledge, acted in a manner contrary to the laws of the Covent. Though it pains me to come to this conclusion, her continued recklessness with regard to her vendetta against Mr. Carter Hamilton cannot be ignored. Given Ms. Carlisle’s willful participation in a conspiracy against Mr. Hamilton with former Covent member Rafael Diamante Jr. to force him to confess to the crime of necromancy, there is no doubt that she has used magic to harm another witch, and has thus broken her oath to this body.

  A film of tears blurred her vision, quickly replaced with a blinding, red haze. He had promised not to do this, had promised his report would reflect the truth about Carter and about herself. He’d murmured those terms of endearment to her. And yet here in her hands was proof that he’d betrayed her, after all.

  But Carter had fooled her before.

  She blinked to clear her vision and focused on Laurel. “How do I know this isn’t some kind of illusion? I’m sure the necromancer has all sorts of tricks up his sleeve.”

  Laurel almost looked sympathetic, the little monster. “I suppose Mr. Gideon didn’t have much of a choice. The Covent knows all about the demon Kur. The Conclave ruled that he wasn’t responsible for being bound to the demon but, in order to retain his membership in the Covent, he needed to demonstrate absolute loyalty. His objective report assured them of that.”

  It rang horribly true. Dev had kept his secret despite having revealed Ione’s. His guilt over his condition had weighed on him for years, and Ione had heaped even more guilt on top of it by telling him the truth about what Rhea had seen of Kur’s torment and Simon’s betrayal.

  But true or not, it was a distraction from what Laurel was really doing there. From the reason Ione had come.

  Laurel raised a hand to brush her fingers through her hair—the same dark chestnut as Phoebe’s and the twins’ natural color—and Ione saw the bracelet slide toward Laurel’s elbow and disappear into her sleeve.

  Laurel seemed to notice Ione’s glance. She dropped her hand away from her hair and covered the braided fetish with her other hand.

  A spark of desperate hope erupted in the darkness.

  Ione tossed the report onto the bench. “Is that how you’re doing it?”

  Laurel looked startled. “Doing what?”

  “Don’t play coy.” Ione took a step closer. “That bracelet on your wrist. The one you’re trying to hide. Where did you get it? What is it?”

  Laurel had been fiddling with the place where it was tied and she pulled it away from her wrist, holding it up, no longer coy but defiant. “You mean this? It’s your sister’s hair. I took it from her while she lay unconscious in the dirt. Or, to be more precise, it’s your sister’s soul.” She stepped up to the altar, holding the fetish near the candle. “On this Day of the Dead, I consign this soul to the flame, and she shall walk forever in the twilight between the worlds.”

  Ione clenched her fists in the air, a futile miming of the action of grabbing for it. She had to tread carefully. If there was a chance of saving Phoebe after all, she had to treat Laurel with kid gloves.

  Ione spoke softly. “She’s your sister, too.”

  Laurel’s periwinkle eyes darkened. “You think I don’t know? That the four of you got to grow up with my father’s attention and affection? That the reason my mother had no money to buy us decent clothes was because all of it went to you? That all the advantages—and the power—of the Carlisle heritage went only to you?” Her voice dripped with vitriol as she spoke the word “power.”

  Ione was subdued for a moment by the palpable anger. “We didn’t know about it at all. We only discovered it when we were trying to figure out who you were.”

  Laurel’s fist clenched around the fetish. “Bullshit. My sisters contested the will.” Her eyes narrowed in acknowledgment of the surprise on Ione’s face. “Yes, I know about that. Even though I was living in foster care by then and it wouldn’t have mattered to me. But your fancy lawyers made sure my sisters didn’t get a penny.”

  “I knew someone contested it, but I didn’t know the details. None of us had any idea that our father had a secret second family until a few days ago.” She could see Laurel didn’t believe her as she opened her fist and contemplated the fetish. Ione had to keep her from completing the ritual she’d obviously begun when she’d ambushed Phoebe last night. “You’re wrong about the power, too. The blood you’ve been expressing such disgust for in your campaign for purity—you have it.”

  Laurel’s face twisted in a bitter sneer. “I may have the recessive gene from my father, but you four got the magic combination. Two tainted parents. You’re the abominations with your Lilith blood and your demonic gifts.”

  “No.” Ione shook her head. “Your mother was a carrier. You have it.”

  Laurel flinched and stepped backward as if Ione had struck her. “No.”

  “As much as I hate to think it, I believe my father—our father—may have sought out our mothers deliberately.” She moved slowly closer to Laurel as she spoke with patient calm. “Or maybe it wasn’t deliberate. Maybe it was just predisposition drawing him to two women who shared his distant ancestry. But I think once he began to have children, he must have known what we were. I don’t know what his endgame was.”

  She was telling herself the story as much as she was telling Laurel, trying to work it out as she pondered it. “Maybe he thought he could avoid some kind of fated destiny for his children by having a second family. But in the end, there were seven of us, all named for powerful Titanesses in one way or another. By the time you were born, he had to have known. He named you Laurel, for victory. For justice.” Ione stopped just inches away from her. “For Themis.”

  Laurel’s hand convulsed around the fetish. “Carter said you would try to confuse me, try to paint yourself as sympathetic and win my trust. It’s not going to happen.”

  “What do you suppose he gains by keeping you feeling isolated and untrusting? If we’re enemies, it gives him strength. It’s not a coincidence that he chose you as his apprentice. He sought you out—to hurt me and to use your power.”

  “I don’t have any power!” Laurel’s shout filled the temple, utterly unlike her normally quiet demeanor.

  “You must, Laurel.” She managed to feel an actual touch of kindness toward the girl. “If you were powerless, he wouldn’t want you.”

  Tears were streaming down Laurel’s cheeks. “He does want me. He wants me for me, not some...some contaminated blood. Besides, I’d know if I had some kind of unnatural power.” For the first time she seemed to be wavering, looking for something to believe.

  “You’ve never had anything unusual happen to you? A feeling you couldn’t explain? Each of our powers seems to correlate in some way to our namesakes’. Themis’s power was the ability to foresee the future.”

  Something flickered in Laurel’s eyes, a flash of recognition, accompanied by a spark of fear.

  “You’ve seen things, haven’t you?” Ione kept her manner gentle. “Tell me what you’ve seen.”

  “Everyone sees things. Like déjà vu, only...”

  “Only something that hasn’t happened yet, instead of something that feels like it’s happened before? No, Laurel. Everyone doesn’t. If you’ve seen things tha
t have come true—”

  “Stop trying to confuse me! You just want to stop me from protecting Carter. You want to destroy a good man.”

  It was all Ione could do not to launch herself at Laurel with fury at the very idea of Carter being a good man. But there was something in Laurel’s words that gave her hope.

  “You’ve seen something about him, haven’t you? You’ve seen other things that have come true, and now you’re afraid that this thing you’ve seen is real, too.”

  “No. He wouldn’t...”

  “He wouldn’t what? What did you see?”

  Laurel opened her hand once more, staring at the braid of dark hair the same color as her own. “I have to trust him. Everything else is lies. The demon blood. Intrinsic magic. Rafael Diamante and Phoebe have taken advantage of the souls of the dead, manipulating them into possessing Carter to force him to tell lies about himself in court.” She glanced up, her eyes dark. “I saw that, you know. That’s why I sought him out. He didn’t seek me. I saw Rafael use his quetzal power over the dead to make Carter confess to crimes he didn’t commit. Are you going to deny that?” When Ione unconsciously bit her lip, a dark smile turned up the corner of Laurel’s mouth. “You can’t. Because you know it’s true.”

  “No,” Ione conceded. “I won’t deny that Rafe used a shade to get Carter to confess.”

  Laurel’s face was triumphant.

  “But they were Carter’s crimes. I know you don’t want to believe that. I didn’t want to believe it when my sisters told me what he was doing to the shades and to Rafe. But I saw it with my own eyes. After he’d cut Rafe’s throat and stabbed Phoebe in the back, I saw Carter move in to finish them off. And he’ll do the same to you if you keep giving him your power.”

  Something had hardened in Laurel’s features. Ione was losing the argument. Confirming the one piece of truth Carter had used to build his lies had been a mistake.

  “I have to stop them.” Laurel seemed to be trying to convince herself. “They brought this on themselves. You all did.”

  As she moved her hand toward the flame once more, Ione did the only thing she could think of. Words weren’t going to cut it. Changing the perception of reality was her only hope. She concentrated on the flame, and the oxygen in the air around it, lifting her hand to draw the oxygen toward her, mentally encapsulating it in her fist. The flame wavered, almost going out, and Laurel made a sharp sound as if Ione had cut off her oxygen to do it.

  Maybe she had. Was that how this worked? Was she really holding the oxygen she’d stolen from the air around the altar in her hand? There was something tempting in the idea of cutting off the source of what was feeding them both.

  Laurel put her other hand to her throat, wheezing as if she was having an asthma attack. Ione started to open her hand, but the memory of Phoebe sucking in that same oxygen through a blue plastic tube, the realization that Phoebe would be lost forever if she let Laurel win, caused her to clench her fist with a vengeance.

  Still trying to hold the fetish toward the flame, Laurel slid to her knees beside the altar, her face turning red.

  “Ione, stop.” Dev’s voice came sharply from the open doors to the atrium.

  Ione wavered but didn’t turn. “You don’t understand. She’s going to give him Phoebe’s soul. She’s going to kill my sister.”

  “I know. But this isn’t the way.” His voice became louder as he approached the front of the temple. “You can’t use magic for harm.”

  Ione spun to face him. “Now you’re quoting the Covent Rede at me? Is that the only thing that matters to you? Following the rules, no matter whose life hangs in the balance?”

  Dev’s eyes sparkled like the dragon’s in the low light of the candles. “I’m trying to stop you from making a mistake you’ll regret for the rest of your life.” He raised his eyes to the dais. “Just as I’m trying to stop Laurel from doing the same.”

  Ione had lost her concentration and she’d felt the loss of control over the element of air, the wind whispering like falling sand through her fingers. The weak flame on the altar candle flared brightly once more as she turned her attention back to it. Beside the altar, Laurel got to her feet, the fetish still clutched in her hand. She hadn’t yet touched it to the flame.

  “It’s not supposed to kill her.” Laurel looked shaken to her core. “He said we were stopping them from taking advantage of the dead.”

  Dev paused before the dais. “Stopping whom?”

  But Laurel didn’t seem to see him or to hear him. “He said the only way to stop her was to bind her soul. That it wouldn’t hurt her.”

  Ione wanted to slap her. “You go take a look at her lying in that hospital with tubes jammed down her throat and tell me you haven’t hurt her.”

  Laurel shuddered and focused at last on Ione. “He’ll use her shade to control me. That’s what I saw. He thinks he’ll take the quetzal’s power if he has my—” Her voice broke before she went on. “My demon blood.” Laurel opened her hand and stared at it. “If you give this back to her, tie it around her wrist, her soul can be re-anchored.” She lifted her palm and held it out toward Dev, who was closest to her, but a sudden gust of wind rushed through the temple and swept it from her hand into the flame.

  Ione heard herself scream, moving in slow motion, the air around her like the thickness of a dream as she tried to grab for the fetish before it burned completely. Dev was closer, but as he thrust out his hand to snuff out the candle, the wind seemed to strike him right beneath the ribs and shove him backward into a row of benches. At the same time the altar table tipped backward, taking the candle and the fetish with it as flames licked across the dais. Whatever spirit had plagued Phoebe the night of Carter’s psychic attack—Matthew or something else—it was here, throwing things, affecting the physical plane. It was no simple shade.

  Laurel looked on in horror as though frozen to the spot as flame began to surround her, and in the tumble of upended benches across from her, Dev was doubled over, trying to breathe, his diaphragm obviously locked in a spasm. It was up to Ione to make sure Phoebe’s soul wasn’t lost forever.

  As she tried to get to the other side of the dais to rescue the fetish from among the overturned altar accoutrements, it dawned on her that Laurel wasn’t just frozen with inaction. She was being held immobile by the same unseen force, and the flames were already licking up the sides of her jeans. Ione would have to choose between letting Phoebe’s soul be torn from her body forever as the fetish was consumed or letting Laurel Carpenter burn to death in front of her eyes.

  With a wail of despair, she scrambled across the wreckage of the altar and wrapped her arms around Laurel, tumbling with her onto the floor to roll out the flames. Both of them were coughing and choking as they tried to struggle to their hands and knees. Dev had recovered his breath, and he moved between them, taking each of them by the arm to haul them out of the temple before they succumbed to smoke inhalation.

  Through the stained-glass windows they could see the glow of the burning altar, the charm around the perpetually burning candles that lit the chamber keeping the fire from spreading any farther than the four-by-six-foot rectangle of the dais itself.

  Dev headed back toward the doors.

  “What are you doing?” Ione’s throat was harsh with smoke as she shouted after him.

  “There’s a fire extinguisher just inside.” He grabbed it from beside the inner set of doors and darted back into the smoky interior, foam spraying in front of him as he ran. In a moment the flames were out.

  Several seconds passed while Ione felt her heart stop, convinced the smoke had gotten to him, but just when she made a move to go in after him, Dev returned.

  His normally brilliant eyes were heavy, watering from the acrid smoke. “There was nothing left of it. I’m sorry, love.”

  Beside her, Laurel dropped to her knees o
n the asphalt and began to sob.

  Chapter 26

  The girl was inconsolable after realizing what Carter Hamilton had seduced her into doing, and it was clear she was no longer going to be giving them any trouble. Dev managed to convince Ione that the best thing for both her and Laurel at this point was rest.

  With Laurel quietly weeping beside him in his rental, he followed Ione to her house, where she gave Laurel a Valium and put her to bed on the couch. It was disheartening, however, how readily Ione had agreed to his suggestion. The fire had gone out of her. And there was only one way to get it back. Phoebe’s soul had to be rescued from Carter Hamilton.

  The conviction that it could be done was best kept to himself. He couldn’t bear to get her hopes up only to fail. Because the chances were high that he would.

  Of paramount importance to his plan was that Phoebe’s body remained in stasis, and Dev was relieved when he returned to the hospital to find her condition largely unchanged. As the doctors had predicted, she’d slipped deeper into the coma but remained stable on the ventilator. Diamante had stayed with her, looking empty and hollow, his eyes red from lack of sleep—or from crying—though he’d sent the twins home to Phoebe’s place to get some rest.

  He clasped Diamante’s shoulder as the other man sat back down after Dev declined to take his seat. “Listen, Rafael—”

  “It’s Rafe. Only strangers call me Rafael.”

  Dev smiled. “Glad to know you don’t consider me a stranger. Listen, I have to tell you something.” Rafe’s shoulder tightened beneath his grip. “But hear me out. I may have a solution. About an hour ago Laurel Carpenter...inadvertently completed Hamilton’s ritual to bind Phoebe’s soul to him.”

  “Oh, God.” Rafe dropped his head forward, his face in his hands. “She’s gone. I knew it. I felt something. I couldn’t see her, but I felt her go.”

  “Maybe not,” Dev reassured him, squeezing the shoulder. “Not permanently, at least.”