“I can’t.” He shook his head. “Hard to explain except I finally understand what my father meant about the low buzzing he was always hearing. There really is a constant buzz in the air. I can’t… between the white light and the buzz, my head won’t shut off. It should kill me. People can’t go forever without sleep, but it’s the curse. It’ll keep me alive a long while like this. Just not capable of rational thought. So… there it is.”
He didn’t tell her anything she didn’t know, yet it burned to hear it all the same. Still, this was his pain, and she wouldn’t make it harder on him by making this all about her feelings. They’d be right there for her to deal with another time.
In any case, she summoned the notebook she wanted to work in and started writing. Why didn’t anyone make up spells outside of school? It was like the entire witching community had gotten lazy. Witches used to invent new spells all the time. Now, it was just a matter of convenience and making things easier on themselves using spells that had been around forever.
In fact, she didn’t even recall making up spells in the upper school. It had been all about mastering old ones, committing them to memory, becoming stronger in her own gifts to be better at the predesigned spells. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d written one.
Unlike the odd journal she’d examined, she didn’t need to write out spells like she was instructing a child how to do them. Impressions would work just fine, assuming her magic didn’t have something wrong with it.
House. In her mind, she pictured the house they stayed in. Boothe Estate with its long hallways, huge rooms, and mysteries that only she seemed concerned with uncovering.
That had to be a good place to start.
She chewed on her lip. What was next? She needed to be able to see what she hadn’t been able to. Lightning lit up the room a second before thunder struck. She shivered and Elliot reached out to rub her arms.
“You can’t see, but you are more attuned to things than anyone I know.”
He kissed her neck. “You make me feel like I’m still alive. I wonder if I am, or if I’m just a ghost in this house.”
“Oh, my darling.” Mel kissed his cheek. “You are very much alive.”
Elliot lifted his eyebrows. “That is debatable, although I love the darling. Keep using that.”
Leave it to Elliot to defuse a tense moment. “Sure, darling. I’ll just shove it on everything, darling. Okay, darling?”
He snorted. “How did I ever get through a night without you, Mel?”
She wasn’t sure how she was going to get through future nights. Mel forced herself back to the trial at hand. She needed to write a spell.
She worked at it for what felt like hours but might have been twenty minutes. It was the sound of Elliot snoring that caught her attention and pulled it away. He was asleep. She could have shouted for joy over it, only that would have defeated the purpose and woken him up.
Of course, it might not have. He was out cold. Mel waved her hand to bring the blanket up around him, and he didn’t stir.
She stared down at what she’d written. It really might work. Melanie was just going to have to harness some of her own magic to see if she could make this happen tonight. She got out of the bed as carefully as she could and snuck out of the room, floating.
Melanie used to sneak around the estate doing magic only teenagers experimented with. It was odd little things but forbidden nonetheless. Outside on these grounds she’d once completely altered the length of her hair until it touched the dirt. A bunch of bugs had crawled up in it and that hadn’t been fun.
She’d never done that again.
Steeling her shoulders she had to remind herself that she was an adult and as long as her magic hurt no one, there was nothing forbidden to her. Still, she worried her lower lip and didn’t rush out to get moving with this spell.
Instead, she waved her hand and sent Ava a message.
Hey, I might be getting ready to do something really dumb. By the time you see this in the morning, after it’s gone through the safety channels, my potential dumbness will have already happened. I guess we’ll know just how stupid I am.
She sent it off and walked into the center hall. With one last look at the spell she’d created—House, Veil, Eyes, Unseen—she opened herself up to her own magic. It had been a long time since she’d done this. Unlike the river spell, doing so didn’t hurt. Some witches did this every day to stay sharp. Her own career hadn’t needed her to be physically strong for the sake of magic, and she’d only dabbled with this on occasion. Mostly, right before court.
Her fingers buzzed. This time however, she was going to shut it down and angle the excess energy toward winning an argument, toward being intuitive, anticipating responses, and keeping her mind sharp. No, she focused it right down to the words on the page.
The notebook flipped fast. Well, that had been unexpected. She hadn’t wanted that to happen. What was going on?
The room flashed a bright light before it seemed to go black and white and then righted itself again. She sucked in a breath. Anxiety rushed through her, but she pushed it away. What had happened? She wanted to see a ghost not…
Melanie stopped her internal rant and looked around. Everything in this place looked… different. It was hard to put her finger on exactly what was wrong until she noticed the chandelier above her head. When she’d done the spell, the chandelier had been intact. Now, it looked like one of the pieces hung down, swinging. She blinked. That wasn’t entirely true. It was like she could see two versions of the chandelier at the same time. One where it was beautiful, dusted, and in one piece. And this version. They both existed together.
She put her hands on her hips. This was so weird. Surely she could come up with a better word than that. Surreal, maybe.
Melanie walked forward. The whole room was doubled. One version was clean, pristine, well looked after, but it was almost like it was a glamour. Like the time she’d grown her hair too long. That hadn’t been real. Witches weren’t supposed to alter reality for extended periods of time. Things could get fuzzy.
Like this house.
Melanie rushed up the stairs. She had to get to the attic while this still lasted. But before that she wanted to check on Elliot.
What did the doubling do to him?
Melanie rushed into the bedroom and came up short. He slept as she’d left him, but all around him, sucking the life right out of his body, were ghosts. They had their hands all over him.
She gasped, not even trying to be quiet. “Get away from him.”
This time every ghost in the room—and there were dozens—turned to stare at her. Dread filled her soul.
Chapter 12
“Get away from him,” she shouted again, rushing toward the ghosts. They didn’t move. She got even closer, not sure what she was going to do. If she could see them, maybe she could touch them?
That didn’t happen. As though there was no one there, her hand went right through the first ghost she tried to grab like they were nothing more than air. Melanie fought back her fear. This was too much. What was happening here? It was like they were feeding off Elliot. Was that part of his curse or the curse itself?
She couldn’t make sense of it.
“Melanie,” Hannah spoke to her with a soft voice. “Don’t forget what you set out to do. I’m counting on you.”
The little ghost was counting on her? To do what? Still, it was a reminder. Much as she’d like to stay here and see what she could do for Elliot, she was clueless as to how. There might be answers upstairs in the attic about what she could do down here to protect him.
She touched his forehead. He was warm but not too hot. For now, he’d hang on. She’d be right back. To do what, she wasn’t exactly sure, but she’d do something. Fixing problems was what she did.
Melanie floated up fast. She’d always been an adequate flyer but not necessarily going to win any award for doing it. Still, she went as fast as she possibly could and managed to get into
the attic. Like everything else, it seemed doubled. Melanie wasn’t certain why she was able to manage this without puking. Usually, she got dizzy pretty easily.
It must have been the spell.
But standing in the middle of the attic was a man she’d never seen before. He was still when she came up before he started pacing, back and forth, back and forth. He had his hands in his hair, and she stared at him.
He was shorter than she was and dressed in old-fashioned clothing, although he was only wearing one boot, which was strange enough to catch her attention. She shook her head. Fashion would have to wait.
“Who are you?” she shouted. It hadn’t occurred to her until she uttered the words that he might not be coherent. There was the little girl downstairs who could make some kind of sense and then there was the gardener with nothing to say in the present.
He whirled around. “You can see me.”
“I can see you.”
He clasped his hands together. “You did a spell. Finally, someone did a spell. When I saw you, I knew you were smart.”
She swallowed. So this was the coherent kind. That was good and bad. She wanted this, and yet it made her want to vomit. “Who are you?”
“My name is Max Boothe. I did this. I’m responsible for this. Whoever you are… you have to fix this.”
She wasn’t even a little bit sure she could. “Keep talking.”
“I… I wanted to be rich. We were nothing.” He took two steps toward her and gripped his head. “I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to talk like this. Everything is always a blinding light. And I lose consciousness.”
That sounded familiar. Very much like what was happening to the man she loved. “Elliot goes through that, or similar things.”
“I know.” He paced again. “All of my descendants have been given the same thing. It’s always because of me. Because of what I did. You have to understand… I wanted to be rich.”
Melanie tilted her head. Once again, whatever it was about her intuition had been right on. It came down to the money. “You guys weren’t rich and you wanted to be. What did you do? Change the river and it did what? Fucked up something inside of you?”
He winced, and she wondered if it was because of what she’d accused him of or because she’d cursed. Her language was probably different than what he’d been used to hearing. Well, she didn’t care. Not even a little bit.
“The river was nothing. It was just a first start. I changed the direction, and we harnessed some of that for companies and our own financial interests. Other small things, the way the wind blew. Small things, but we were able to steadily build revenue.”
She used to deal with this kind of thing every day. The financial markets had been her specialty for her clients. A touch here, a dash here, keeping the law on their side. She’d always been great at managing these kinds of things. And like the clients she dealt with back then, she knew exactly where this kind of thing was going to go next.
“It wasn’t enough money.”
He flared his nostrils. “I can’t justify it except that we were terrified to be poor. My wife wanted to keep up with the neighbors, and I wanted to beat them. We built this place up, placed wards on it. I even used my wand like an old fashioned heathen.”
“And then something happened.” She filled in the blank. “To you. To this house.”
He visibly swallowed. “Undo it, please. Generation after generation things go terribly wrong. It has killed all my descendants, and I am stuck up here watching. Undo it. Please.”
Whatever she would have said, she never got to say because the spell she’d placed on herself wore off. Like the temporary length of her hair when she’d spelled it to grow, it could only stay that way for so long.
Her vision was fading. She’d never be able to see this without the spell, but she wasn’t going to just spell herself again. If she was going to do this, then she was going to have to some help. A simple vision spell she could make up, but undoing a spell that controlled the fate of the Boothe family for generations was beyond her.
She needed help.
Melanie turned and ran down the stairs. She couldn’t protect Elliot from this, but she could be proactive and get him some people who could help.
“Lawson,” she verbally dictated the note as she ran. “I need all of you, and I need you to get in here without setting off the security. Please. Now. As soon as you get this.”
The best thing Elliot could do was sleep. The last thing she needed was to wake him up in the middle of this mess. For all she knew, the ghosts were always on him and only some of them were sometimes visible. Maybe she’d get to ask the man in the attic who’d caused this, maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe somehow she’d deal with the fact that every time she’d touched him, been intimate with him, the ghosts were probably there. She shuddered. Yeah… she was putting that right away in the category of “cognitive dissonance is a good thing” box.
By the time she got to the bottom of the stairs, Lawson stood there. That didn’t surprise her in the least. He’d figured out how to get through Elliot’s security. That was what he did.
“Mel? What the fuck?”
She took a deep breath. “I need you to follow me into a very strange path and not act like I’m nuts.”
He tilted his head. “Talk.”
* * *
She stood around the table as Eleanor scribbled notes on the notebook in front of her. She’d taken Melanie’s original spell and altered it. Or was trying to. It turned out Eleanor really had a skill for this. Next to her, Mitchell oscillated between pacing and rubbing his wife’s back.
Everyone else was silent. She didn’t blame them. This was a lot to digest. More than she’d imagined it to be.
A spell to make a family richer had gone askew, and now, generations later, there was nothing but tragedy. The question was how had he done it. And for that, they had to ask him. They had to know the right questions to ask.
Kim finally spoke from where she sat in the corner. She didn’t feel well, but she was working it out. Melanie was impressed by how tough the other woman seemed to be despite the nausea. Mel hated puking.
“Here’s the thing about this curse.” Kim rubbed her face. “It moves all over him, which makes sense if what we are seeing is actually ghosts or something draining his energy like a giant sucking leach. Taking a piece of him at a time, as though they need his energy to keep going. But if he is their food source, so to speak, then by doing this, they’re taking away the only thing they can feed on. And then they lose what they need.”
Mel shuddered. The very idea, even though she’d seen it, was just awful.
Kim stumbled to her feet, and Stefan steadied her. “Sorry, most women get sick in the morning. I’m middle of the night. So I’m doing the best I can here.”
Stefan nudged her. “Want to go home?”
“No. I want to finish my thought.” She groaned. “The curse will protect itself. It’s like a living creature. Try and kill it, it will fight back.”
Melanie grasped what was not being said. “The only thing it can fight back against is Elliot. But why would it want to? I mean… do you kill your only source of food?”
“You do, if you think it’s going to go away. You get as much as you can.”
Lawson knocked his fingers on the table. “Give me something to destroy, and I’ll destroy it.”
Eleanor floated up the paper. “Maybe we can all see it this way.”
“We need to exorcise the ghosts. Maybe we do it the human way.” Stefan met Eleanor’s gaze. “What do you think?”
Eleanor shook her head. “It’s not what I think. Not really. It’s what Elliot thinks, or if he’s not capable of making this kind of decision, it’s what Mel thinks.”
“What I think?” Melanie wasn’t certain she had the right to do that. “I’m not his wife. Even if he weren’t cursed, I don’t think I’d be that. He’d have met someone in all of those years out there and never have met me. We have something but it
might just be because of the curse.”
Ava wrapped her arms around her. “What difference does that make really? We aren’t remaking the past. Even with all the magic in this room, we can’t do that. What happened, happened. You love each other. So you can decide if he can’t.”
As if on cue, Elliot stumbled into the room. He held his head, and with her heart stuttering, Mel ran over to him. “Hey, are you okay?”
He jolted backward. “Who are you? Who’s here?”
She swallowed. “It’s Melanie. And I’ve brought Lawson and the others here. We have an idea of how to help.”
Elliot paled. “Melanie who? I… I don’t know who you are. Any of you. Who are you? Who… who am I? Why can’t I see?”
Coldness wafted over her. He’d been fine before he fell asleep, or still relatively coherent. It had taken years for his father to get to this point. How could it have been a matter of hours?
Still, he was terrified and that was the most important thing right now. As long as he was alive and talking they could get this thing off of him and then the healers could do what they did.
“That’s okay. Listen, you’re not well right now. Be calm. Let’s sit down.”
He shook his head, backing into the wall behind him. “Something is very wrong.”
She whirled around. “Let’s do whatever we need to do to make this happen. Exorcism. Whatever. Make the spell happen. There are probably ghosts all over him right now.”
Mitchell waved his hand in the air. “Everyone in a circle. No, Ava, Kim, out of here. I don’t want these ghosts messing with your pregnancies. This is all new to me, and I’m making it up as I go along.”
Kim nodded, grabbing onto Ava’s hand and leading her out the door. They were gone just as Elliot doubled over. That couldn’t be a good sign. Maybe the ghosts seeing her had caused just what Kim had predicted and they doubled down their attack on him.
She put her hand on his back. What she wanted to do was hold him but he didn’t know her, and she wasn’t his wife. Consent wasn’t necessarily implied when it wasn’t given.
Tragic Magic: Wards and Wands #3 Page 14
