"I'm so sorry, Dad."
He shrugged and held up his palms.
"She never handled change very well. I think you moving away and Sydney's death just became too much. But I have faith in her, you know? I think she'll work through this stuff and then maybe..." he trailed off.
Abby knew what he wanted to imply, but also sensed that he did not truly believe it. Neither did she for that matter. Once you escaped from someone like Becky, you were unlikely to ever go back.
"It's okay," Abby told him. "It's okay to do what's right for you."
He smiled at her and nodded, but he stared at the floor for several more seconds. When he looked up, Abby saw the sorrow in his eyes.
"She's had a hard life, you know. I never knew all of what went on, but I think something horrible happened to your mom when she was a little girl. I think she never got over it."
Abby frowned.
"She never said anything like that to me. What do you think happened to her?"
"I don't know. I tried to ask her a few times, but you know your mom, if she doesn't want to talk about it, she's not going to."
"What about this Cody character? Why on earth did she let him move in?"
Jim grimaced and a flash of anger passed over his normally placid features.
"He's an opportunist, a total user. He worked delivering packages for Anni's Custom Goods, you know that furniture shop on the west side of town?"
"Yeah, I remember it."
"Well he came by four or five times to drop off more of your mother's purchases, which has gotten out of control, by the way. Why Sydney left your mom all that money is beyond me."
"I don't think she intended for it to go that way."
"No, of course, you're right. What a tragedy. But I don't believe Rod killed her. Your mom was never fond of him, but I once saw him run into the street to pick up a turtle that was going to get run over. Not the kind of guy to murder anyone, let alone his wife, but then what do I know?"
"I don't think he did it either," Abby assured him. "Tell me more about Cody."
"Oh yes, Cody," he said the name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. "He started bringing your mom coffee with the deliveries and then cigarettes. He would stay and chat with her. After a couple of weeks, he quit his job and moved in. I hadn't been living there for a while so I didn't know right away. I stopped by every few days to check on her. One day he answered the door."
"It's not romantic?"
"No, no, at least I don't think so. Your mother would never..."
Though he didn't finish the thought, and Abby knew he felt as unsure about what Becky would do as she did.
"I tried to kick him out," Jim admitted, sheepishly. "I threw a bunch of his stuff out on the front lawn, called him a freeloader. Becky called the police. Can you believe that? They told me that I had to leave and he could stay."
Jim ran a hand anxiously over his freshly shaved chin.
Abby's heart ached for the complete bewilderment etched on his face.
She moved forward and wrapped her arms around him. He hugged her back, stiffly at first. Hers had never been an affectionate family. They stood that way for several seconds and Abby felt her dad finally relax against her.
"I'm sorry, Abby," he said into her hair. "I'm sorry that I let it go on for so many years. Your mother needed help."
Abby felt tears slide down her cheeks. She fought the sobs that seemed always to be hovering lately.
"I'm sorry too, Dad."
"Can I help?" Sebastian asked, walking into the kitchen. "Oh."
He started to turn away, but Jim stopped him.
"Sure you can," Jim exclaimed. He moved back toward Sebastian and opened a cupboard. "Got bowls right here if you want to get those out. Abby, biscuits are in the oven."
****
"I feel lost, Elda," Helena confided.
They stood in the scallop-shaped greenhouse that bordered the second lagoon. The glass windows were fogged from the warmth. Helena perched on a high stool and carefully trimmed a bonsai tree, searching for a calm that always seemed just over the next cut, breath or moment.
"It will take time, Helena," Elda soothed. She brought Helena a cup of tea from the thermos Bridget had prepared that morning. It contained a special blend of oils and herbs to aid in Helena's physical and emotional healing.
Helena took the cup and sipped it, looking toward the sky and wishing the sun would break through the clouds.
"I want to help. I want to dig into the curse. I want to track down Dafne. I have a thousand desires, but they are all locked in some chamber within me, and I appear to have lost the key."
"Your body knows better than your mind, Helena. Sometimes the only way to slow us down is to literally slow us down." Elda nodded toward Helena's cane.
"I don't want to be left out, though. I heard you and Faustine in the library. He went to see the Lourdes. Why didn't anyone tell me?"
"Because he didn't want to alarm anyone, dear. We're not hiding from you. We'll discuss our findings soon. Julian will reach out to Oliver and Abby and find out if they have any new information. It can't happen overnight. Not uncovering this curse, and not your recovery."
"Even Bridget is so involved. She's made a thousand of those powders that Julian created. She has two cupboards of anti-venom. I've never seen her so determined."
Elda chuckled, "I know, it's a terrible motivator, but it has brought us all screaming awake from our sleep."
"Why did Oliver and Lydie go back to Abby's?"
"Because I asked him to."
Helena frowned.
"I asked him to keep an eye on Abby. I'm concerned that this curse is working behind the scenes. More so, I'm afraid that the fire in the cave marked some transition and we're unaware. Abby drank the blood from that bottle, Helena. No one has talked about it, but Sebastian found it clutched in her hand and empty. That blood is part of the Vepar's ritual. How did she come upon it in the woods, in that blizzard?" Elda shuddered. "Something led her to it and she drank it and I'm positive that she has no memory of doing so."
"You think we walked into a trap?"
Elda looked far away and when her gaze returned, she appeared frightened.
"I think that Tobias, Alva, and most importantly Kanti got exactly what they wanted."
Chapter 10
"A VW Bus?" Abby laughed when Oliver and Sebastian drove up to the house.
They had returned from Lansing several days earlier to prepare for their road trip. Sebastian and Oliver had gone into Trager that morning to rent a vehicle for their adventure to New Orleans.
"Interesting rental choice."
"I bought it," Oliver said with a shrug, his eyes twinkling. "I need to be more portable."
"Ooh, a hippie van," Lydie squealed, catapulting from the porch into a giant snowbank that nearly swallowed her whole. She stood and shook her hair from side to side, flinging snow from her blonde tresses.
They all laughed. Abby realized that Lydie did need a vacation. In fact, they all needed an opportunity to get out of Michigan.
Once officially on the road, Abby settled comfortably into the crook of Sebastian's arm and dozed off. She felt a little tug in her heart as they pulled away from their new house, but also looked forward to the time with friends. It felt like a pre-witch experience, road tripping. Oliver drove the first shift with Lydie as copilot. They picked up Victor and Kendra in Chicago.
****
Victor offered up an iPod and Lydie found a playlist of Aerosmith and turned it on.
"Shouldn't you have picked the Jonas Brothers or something, Lyds?" Oliver teased.
"They're too naive," she said simply. "I prefer people who have done bad stuff. They understand more about the world."
Oliver grimaced, but didn't respond. In truth, he didn't want to know how deep Lydie's sadness ran. He had not told Elda about the road trip, despite his promise to communicate everything that was happening. He knew she would resist the idea and he didn't want t
he flack.
****
Helena returned to the library and settled into a chair by the fire. She shivered and layered an afghan over her lap. Despite the warmth in the room, she still felt a chill. The chill didn't often go away since the attack. She spent most of her time in heavy sweaters and layers of skirts. Sometimes when she grew really cold, the scars burned cold too.
She lifted a stack of journal pages that she had brought in from the vault. There were hundreds of them, and the discovery process would be slow even with Victor's scanning contraption. Helena felt sure that the heart of their woes lay in those boxes.
The journal she read had been kept by a man named Christopher. Tiny cursive writing filled the pages. Helena closed her eyes for a moment and asked for clarity in the words and then returned to the pages. She skimmed through the first fifty pages, reading about witch sightings. Christopher himself had never seen a witch, but had been compiling stories from all over the state. People who claimed a woman cured their terminal illness with a tiny, sweet-smelling poultice, or a man who insisted his foe had vanished during a duel rather than fire his gun. Helena grew tired and blinked to stay awake. Only when her eyes drifted across the name Kanti did she suddenly snap back to focus.
Date 17 October 1856
I recorded this story by an Ojibwe elder:
He took her in broad daylight, the Algonquian man told me. Swept her into the woods like a shadow. Her mother woke, feeling the aching in her womb at the absence of her most magical child. The tribe searched the woods for days, weeks, months. They traveled to other tribes, they sent word along the trade lines, but not a speck of her remained, not a sighting or a detail. Only a single witness existed, Mukki, youngest son of Nootau. He told the mother and father of a giant covered in fur that snatched Kanti from the fireside. The boy was so terrified by the hulking beast, he'd burrowed back into his skins and fallen deeply asleep. Only later would he wake to the camp's hysteria and tell the others. By then it was too late.
What do we know about this Kanti? Was she a witch or merely a special tribal woman? She has appeared in the journals of others and I cannot help, but feel that she is important. When we find a piece of her history it is like discovering a small treasure, but having nowhere to sell the piece, it is valuable only to us, the collectors of history. We can only document it. But who was Kanti, and why she is woven into the history of the witches of the north?
The journal ended just five pages later. A few more stories and two short reflections by the author. Had the author died? Simply begun writing in another book? Helena set the journal aside, making a mental note to show the excerpt to Elda.
****
"It's huge," Lydie whispered, peering out the window at the towering Victorian Gothic house they had rented for the week. Lydie and Abby had spent most of their drive through the neighborhoods of New Orleans gushing over the sprawling mansions.
"It's beautiful," Abby added, surveying the bushes bursting with deep violet roses. They watched it through a black, wrought-iron fence with tiny spires poking toward the spider-like cypress trees.
"And spooky," Oliver said.
Sebastian pulled into the driveway and parked the van.
The house rose two stories with white Corinthian columns flanking the grand entrance.
While the group unloaded their bags, Abby went to the little black box over the door and typed in the house code. A metallic click sounded and she opened the heavy front door. Inside, the house smelled of lilacs. She slipped off her boots and padded over shining wood floors in her socked feet. She took a few steps and then slid. The floors, freshly polished, weren't quite as slick as an ice rink, but close enough. She trotted and then slid again.
She came to a stop in front of a set of French glass doors that opened into a cavernous bedroom. An enormous medieval bed stood beneath a copper chandelier, shaped like a many-pointed star. Colored light shone through the stained-glass window behind the bed and made rainbow patterns on the white comforter.
"Shotgun this room," Abby said when Victor walked in behind her.
"Wow, this is epic," he agreed, running his hand along the whorls and ridges of the bed frame. "It looks like a witch's bed."
They both laughed, but it did.
"What looks like a witch's bed?" Kendra asked. "Oh," she sighed. "It's gorgeous."
"And spooky," Oliver added over Abby's shoulder.
She elbowed him and laughed.
"It's not spooky, just..."
"Special," Sebastian finished. He moved in behind Abby and breathed into her hair. She pressed back against him.
"Whoa, look at that bed," Lydie squealed sliding into the room on her own socked feet.
They all laughed. Oliver scooped Lydie up and ran out. Abby heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs.
"Whee," Lydie called.
"Better catch them or Oliver's going to claim the second best bedroom," Victor joked, steering Kendra out of the room.
Sebastian moved to the window and looked at the stained glass.
"The Virgin Mary," he said, tracing the vague outline of a woman's shape in the reds and blues of the glass.
Abby followed the line that his fingers drew, and slowly the shape emerged.
"I didn't see it before," she said.
"Neither did I,' he admitted. "But then as I stared at it, she started to emerge. A good sign, I think. My mother always loved the Virgin Mary. She wore a little silver amulet with an inscription of Mary around her neck."
"Was your mother religious?" Abby asked, surprised.
Sebastian smiled and Abby saw the look of happy memories in his eyes.
"No, raised Catholic though, so she had a handful of superstitions. Her mother gave her the charm and she would have given it to Claire, but..."
"She was wearing it when she died?"
"I assume so. The truth is I don't know. I never saw it again after her death. I searched our house, but by then we were moving and everything was in boxes. I ripped the place apart, but no necklace."
Abby lifted Sebastian's hand to her lips and kissed it softly.
"I wish I could have known them-your parents and your sister too, Claire. I think in all of this, that is my only regret, that I met you after they were already gone."
Sebastian tucked a wayward curl behind her ear and kissed her.
"I wish that too."
****
Elda stood in front of the huge mirror and waited for the familiar sheen to slide down the reflective surface. They had bewitched it again, with the help of the Sorciére witches, into a two-way glass; however, it only transformed for two hours every first Friday. She saw the shift as the glass undulated before her.
As she began to walk through, Elda closed her eyes to avoid the dizziness that sometimes befell her. She stepped into the Coven of Sorciére's castle, into a small sitting room rarely used by the Sorciére witches. Galla had felt it prudent that the mirror remain secret from the coven, other than those witches directly involved in the happenings at Ula.
Elda steadied her hand against a tall chair and then sat down, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. The transition through time and space had begun to take a toll on her, and she noticed more and more a feeling of vertigo when she made the journey.
The room was cold and dark except for a single lamp. The shade, hung with gold fringed tassels, trembled with Elda's movement into the room. She watched the shadows that the light cast on the floor and she remembered how enthralling she had found shadows as a young girl. She drove her parents mad with the elaborate monsters she envisioned in those dark shapes. In those days, candles illuminated everything and shadows were much more dynamic and, in her mind, sinister.
"You've arrived," Galla observed as she slipped through the doorway, holding a mug of tea. "I prepared a tonic for you. Faustine mentioned that you've been feeling a bit ill during the passage?"
Elda took the cup and sipped the sweet gingery tea.
"Yes, each time a bit more,
it seems. Apparently I'm not sixteen anymore."
Galla chuckled and nodded her agreement. "Tell me about it."
"So have there been any findings?" Elda asked. She wanted to sit and relax and chat with Galla about trivial things, but her instincts told her that Galla had something to share.
"Yes, but not here. Let us go to my private chamber."
Elda did not ask more. There was only one reason Galla would prefer to speak in her private room: a need for secrecy.
Galla took a series of hallways and Elda soon lost track of their movements.
"Through here," Galla said at last, stopping at a heavy door adorned with a brass cat's face. Galla took a slender skeleton key from her pocket and clicked open the lock.
"You lock your door?" Elda asked, surprised.
"A coven decision," Galla told her. "After the attack on Ula, we've been reinforcing on all fronts. In truth, I think the news about Indra is what did it. If one of our own is capable of deceiving us, then we must protect ourselves from the enemy within as well as without."
Galla spoke with reluctant decisiveness. Only when they closed the door behind them, did she continue.
"I am less than thrilled about the changes," she told Elda. "But there is a sense of mutiny in the air. I am trying to put on a unified front even if my heart isn't in it."
Elda surveyed Galla's space. It was an apartment more than a room. Chunky old-world furniture was arranged in a sitting area next to a window that revealed an orange and pink sky as the sun began its descent. A kitchenette held tea things and sparkling wine goblets. One corner of the room overflowed with plants and a towering glass cylinder turned slowly, herbs poking from hydroponic pods. Another space revealed a claw-footed desk. The surface was perfectly clear except for a circle of crystals arranged around a single white candle. Beneath the desk, stacks of books rose from the floor.
"More tea?" Galla moved to the kitchenette and took an additional mug from the cupboard.
Kanti (Born of Shadows Book 3) Page 10
