Succession of Witches (The Familiar Series)

by Karen Mead

  There was a creak, and Sam came out the door behind the counter, holding a tray full of clean plates and saucers. “Visitors, I see,” he said. “If you’re going to come here and stand around, you may as well…” He caught sight of Ethan in the far corner of the room and his face froze. He had never seen the boy before, but there weren’t many explanations for why an 11-year-old boy would be at the shop with Mike and Jay at 11 p.m., Cassie supposed. He realized instantly that she had fetched the familiar against his wishes.

  Cassie winced, expecting to hear a deafening cacophony as he dropped the tray and all the plates shattered. However, looking perfectly calm, Sam gently put the tray down on a counter, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes when he spoke to her. “That’s him, isn’t it? You lied to me. You deliberately lied to me, and stole another demon’s familiar.”

  At that, he did look at her, and the blankness in his face scared her far more than a glare would have. He wasn’t emoting at all, because he knew he couldn’t afford to. Cassie swallowed painfully, her throat suddenly feeling dry.

  “Not really; I didn’t steal a familiar. Only you can do that. I just took him from the house in Connecticut and brought him here, that’s all. This way, if you still don’t want to rescue him from an abusive master you can tell him that to his face,” she whispered. She was glossing over the house burning part for the time being.

  Sam continued to look at her with that same terrifying blankness. “Cassandra,” he said so softly she could barely hear him, “can I talk to you in the back for a moment, please?”

  Before Cassie could open her mouth to say no, Dwight interjected. “I am not letting her go back there alone with you,” he said quietly to Sam. “You know I’m right.”

  “She’s not on the clock, she’s not your responsibility,” said Sam through gritted teeth, finally starting to show some emotion.

  At that, a group of customers approached the counter and they had to curtail the conversation. Dwight plastered on a fake smile and served the newcomers. Khalil went behind the bar to make some drinks, which normally wouldn’t be allowed since he was in his street clothes, but Dwight didn’t seem to care. Sam put the dishes he had cleaned into the proper cupboard, occasionally stealing glances at the boy sitting at the back table.

  After Dwight had finished serving the customers, who fortunately had only wanted drip coffee, he wrote out a sign that said “Back in Five Minutes,” propped it up on the counter and inclined his head toward the back room. After dropping off the hot chocolates at Ethan’s table, Khalil headed for the back with them.

  When they entered the break room, Sam kept walking towards the door that led to the side alley. “Just give me a moment, I’ll be right back,” he said quietly. Cassie, Dwight and Khalil looked at each other nervously.

  Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder and they all jumped. Cassie put her hands over her mouth as the thunder claps continued, sharper and more sudden than any natural phenomenon. Khalil tried to look as though it wasn’t affecting him, but Cassie could see that his eyes were unusually wide; Dwight just looked tired.

  Next they saw flashes of lightning illuminate the sky, and for the briefest moment, the lights flickered, but the power came back on. A few seconds later, Sam came back in. “Sorry about that,” he said, his face still blank. “A safety precaution. Now explain yourself,” he said.

  Cassie cleared her throat. “Sam I—”

  “Not you,” said Sam, crossing his arms. “I’m angry with you, but this is the way you’re made. I don’t know if you can even help it. You, on the other hand,” he said, fixing his gaze on Khalil, “You could have stopped this if you told me what Cassie was up to. Instead, you enabled her. Why?”

  Khalil walked a few steps forward until he was only a foot or two away from Sam. They were almost the same height, so it was easy for him to look the other man in the eye. “Because I thought she was right, and if I didn’t help her, she was going to do it anyway. And I had no responsibility to tell you.”

  There was a pause, and then Sam blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “This whole entourage thing, it’s just for show. Or at least, that’s what you said. You said we don’t really have to serve you, it’s just for form. If you want to go back on that now, I want to know,” said Khalil.

  To Cassie’s surprise, Sam took a step back. “It is just for show, but that’s not what this is about. You knew she was going to do something dangerous…I would think, as a friend—”

  “Friends don’t pull rank on friends, and friends don’t threaten friends. I think you want it both ways and I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to happen. If you think it’s my job to report on Cassie to you, then I want out of this group, or whatever the hell it is,” Khalil finished, taking a deep breath after he finished talking.

  “Me too,” Dwight added softly.

  There was a long pause, so long Cassie was tempted to yell something, anything to break the silence, then Sam sighed and rubbed his eyes, and she knew the worst was over. “You’re right. You’re completely right, and I’m sorry. I really, really wish you all hadn’t done what you did, though.” He drew in a deep breath and sighed again. “Bring him in here.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sam found he couldn’t stay mad at Cassie for very long, at least not this time. Even though the thought had never occurred to him until he said it out loud, he found what he had said to her was true: it was just the way she was made. He didn’t know why, but he had confidence that the drive she must have felt to rescue the boy was as strong as any compulsion, and it bothered him that he could be so sure of that without knowing the reason.

  Cassie opened the door, holding a small redheaded boy by the hand. Physically, he looked young for his age, but the expression on his face hinted at a wisdom beyond his years. Sam wasn’t surprised; being stolen from your parents and made to serve a demon was one of those situations that merited some instant growing up.

  “Hello, Ethan,” he said, settling into the folding metal chair. “Do you know who I am?”

  Cassie let go of his hand and stepped back, and the boy nodded. “Yessir. You’re Cassie’s master, I can see the bond.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow at that. “You can see it?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Ethan, looking back and forth between Sam and Cassie. “It’s black and gold and pink, and it’s really strong. You’re really strong,” he said to Sam. His eyes grew wide. “I bet you could kill Pascal, if you wanted to.”

  “Maybe, I’d rather not find out,” said Sam. “Is he…mean to you?”

  “Of course he’s mean to him Sam, he’s a demon who steals kids! Look at his arms, he’s—“

  “I think he can speak for himself, Cassie.”

  Ethan looked down before he answered. “He’s usually not too bad. Mostly he ignores me,” he said. “When he brought me to his house, he said ‘this is your room, stay here and don’t bother me.’ And his maid feeds me, and she’ll get me whatever I want, like Cookie Crunch for breakfast and all the other stuff my mom would never buy me.” Sam had to smile at that.

  “But a couple of times a week, he comes in and….” He trailed off.

  “And you would like me to break your bond with him so you can go back to your parents,” Sam said.

  Ethan continued looking down and didn’t answer. Sam imagined that he was trying not to cry.

  “Alright,” he said, changing position in the chair. “Come here. Sit down.”

  Ethan did as he was told, sitting down cross-legged in front of Sam.

  “Are you going to pass out? Like you did with me?” asked Cassie, nervously.

  “I was already exhausted when I bonded you, hopefully I can do a little better today,” he said. Thinking of the day he was forced to bond with Cassie still put his teeth on edge. He put his hands on Ethan’s temples, gently. “Now, think of something relaxing. It can be anything, as long as it puts you into a good mood. I’m going to try to break the bond now.”

  Ethan no
dded, then Sam closed his eyes. Reaching out with his magical sense, he could see the bond the boy had with Pascal; it was a bright, almost electric blue color. It was frayed, though; if he concentrated, Sam could see weaknesses in the mesh, as though Ethan had struggled against it without even realizing he was doing it. He probably had.

  Bits and pieces of the demon’s memories became visible: a successful business meeting, a secret affair with a pretty law student that had ended badly and a memory of court, where Sam had the strange experience of seeing the back of his own head through the other demon’s eyes. Next to all the seemingly random memories, he saw the first time Pascal had laid eyes on Ethan from across the school parking lot.

  Breaking the bond was almost too easy; he severed it slowly more to cushion Ethan from any possible shock than because he needed to. Once the last filaments had disintegrated, Sam waited for any contact from Pascal, but there was none. Maybe the demon was too far away, or maybe he hadn’t invested too much of himself in this bond, but the mental scream of rage Sam was half-expecting never came.

  He had never consciously set up a bond with Cassie; it had just kind of happened. This time, he wanted to do it right.

  I take this child as my second familiar; may his power be my own, he thought. As a loop of his own black magic wrapped around the boy’s neck, Sam breathed in psychically, testing the boy’s energy. He could see why Pascal wanted him: while the well of power within him was neither as pure nor as bountiful as Cassie’s, there was something appealing about it nonetheless. It was solid, earthy magic; the kind of magic you could use to make crops grow, or summon a spring rain. It would be nigh-useless for curses, but that was probably just as well.

  With Cassie in the room, he could sense a kind of triangle forming between the three of them: Cassie’s glittering, liquid silver magic, his own black magic, and this strange hodgepodge of warm colors that was Ethan’s. Idly, he wondered if Cassie could feel their energies resonating together, or if her unpredictable magical senses weren’t cooperating.

  As he double and triple-knotted the loop, fragments of Ethan’s own memories began to play in his mind’s eye. Ethan, younger, crying at the bottom of the steps while his father backhanded his mother; Ethan, a little older, wearing a long-sleeved shirt to school in June to hide the bruises on his arms. The boy lying to the school social worker, saying he fell down the stairs; his mother, telling him that Daddy wouldn’t beat him so much if he would be a good boy and stop spending so much time on the computer. Ethan, meeting a man in an empty parking lot, Pascal, who greeted him with a smile....

  As soon as the final cords of the bond locked into place, Sam pushed the boy away—softly, but apparently with more force than he’d intended.

  “Sam!” Cassie exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” said Ethan, not moving from his position on the floor.

  “He lied to you, Cassie. He doesn’t want to go back to his parents,” said Sam, slumping in his chair. Despite taking some of Ethan’s magic into himself, he felt exhausted.

  Cassie dropped to Ethan’s side, cradling the now sobbing boy in her arms. “What are you talking about?”

  “In his mind, I saw. Pascal wasn’t the abusive one—at least, not compared to Mom and Dad.”

  “What?” said Cassie, looking at Ethan with open-mouthed disbelief. “His parents are abusive?”

  “Yes, so much so that he offered to go away with Pascal willingly, at least at first,” said Sam. “Pascal’s not an idiot. Why take a child from a healthy home, who will kick and scream, when you can take one who won’t even fight you,” he said bitterly.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ethan, still crying. “But, I promise I won’t get in the way. I can work in the shop, I can clean stuff, I’ll do anything as long as you let me stay.”

  Sam rose to his feet, and looked down at Cassie. “Now you’ve really done it,” he said softly.

  At that moment, Jay opened the door. “Sam, some people are here to see you.”

  “I won’t see them,” said Sam. “Tell them to come back another time.”

  “Um,” said Jay, widening his eyes at the sight of Ethan crying in Cassie’s arms on the floor. “The thing is, she says she has an appointment, and she seems pretty set on it. And there are a bunch of people with her, and um, I could be wrong, but I think their teeth all look kind of pointy….”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At Jay’s words, Sam moved like a shot, springing out of his chair and pushing past Jay to get to the front of the shop. Cassie gave Ethan one more comforting hug, then motioned Jay to come over and take her place.

  “Is he okay?” asked Jay, kneeling down on the floor next to her. “Did the bond not work?”

  “Oh, it worked,” said Cassie. “Look, I’ll explain later, just stay with him for a little while, okay?”

  When she got to the front of the shop, Sam was arguing in the middle of the cafe with a tiny redheaded girl wearing a skimpy outfit, careful to keep his voice down so as not to alarm the few remaining customers.

  “I told you to bring them to my apartment, not here!” he hissed as Cassie approached. “What did you do this for?”

  If the redhead was intimidated, she didn’t show it. She crossed her arms in front of her low-cut top and shrugged. “Hey, when you said to bring them here, I thought you meant your territory, not your bedroom. It would be a little tight for this many people in a motel room, don’t you think?”

  “This many people?” muttered Cassie, then she noticed a new group of customers sitting at the old oak table in the front window. There were no drinks on the table and the group was watching Sam’s conversation with the girl intently.

  “I didn’t know how many of you there were,” Sam whispered, then sighed; he was doing a lot of that tonight. “Look, the shop closes in half an hour, can you all just sit tight until then? I can’t discuss this while we’re open.”

  The redhead smiled, showing off her pointy incisors. Vampire’s teeth were funny, Cassie mused; they didn’t usually appear sharp and elongated enough to arouse suspicion, but once you knew someone was a vampire, suddenly it seemed incredibly obvious that they had fangs.

  “No problem, we have plenty of time. Nothing but time, right now,” she said, looking back towards her group at the table with a frown.

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  The next 30 minutes seemed to crawl. Even though they weren’t on the clock, Cassie, Jay and Khalil put on their aprons and helped Sam and Dwight with the pre-close cleaning and preparations for the next morning; with five people working, it was easy to check everything off. After all, they couldn’t have the vampires waiting because a blender hadn’t been wiped down.

  Mike kept Ethan busy by showing him some of the games on his netbook. The boy had puffy eyes and still looked upset, but he brightened slightly when Cassie brought him half of a giant chocolate chip cookie. The vampires talked quietly among themselves, but Cassie didn’t know the topic; they quieted down whenever she came near. They did steal glances at Ethan from time to time, which made her nervous.

  At midnight, the last non-vampiric customers left the shop; by 12:10, all the cleaning was finished. Instead of putting the chairs on the tables, Sam put a bunch of them out in rows. Finished, he sat in the center chair in front of the register and motioned for Cassie to come sit next to him. Cassie bit her lip, but obeyed; this was obviously official entourage business, and they had to go through the motions. She only grimaced slightly when Sam put his hand on the small of her back.

  “Mike, can you take Ethan into the back with you please?” said Sam, his eyes not leaving the group of vampires. Mike closed his netbook and showed the boy into the break room as Dwight, Khalil and Jay took their seats on either side of Cassie and Sam. Ethan looked over his shoulder at the vampires with wide-eyed wonder as the door closed behind him.

  Gracefully, the vampires got up from their place at the corner
table and approached the row of six chairs Sam had set up for them. There was the redhead with the pageboy haircut, an older gentleman in a tweed jacket, a tall, dark-haired man with a mustache and goatee, a bald man in a leather jacket, a young black woman who kept looking down at the floor, and a large man who looked like a body builder. Cassie noticed that the redhead was staying next to the other woman with a protective air, even though the latter towered over her.

  “I suppose there’s no need to offer your group drinks?” Sam began.

  The older man in the tweed jacket smiled a sad little smile. “No need, thank you.”

  Khalil leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Are they what I think they are?”

  “Yup.”

  “God, we’re doing this now? What changed?”

  At that, the redhead laughed, a pleasant sound.

  “Sorry, wasn’t trying to listen in, but you know, keen hearing. I’m Miri by the way.” She smiled brightly at Khalil.

  “I’m Khalil, actual living person,” he responded coldly. Miri’s smile disappeared, and the vampire men glared at Khalil.

  Sam spoke, still looking at the vampires. “Khalil, I meant what I said before. You know that. But right now, you will listen to me, and you will treat our guests with respect. Is that clear?”

  “Yessir,” said Khalil, answering the vampires’ glares with one of his own. “I just don’t know why we’re entertaining vampires now, when months ago, you would have never—”

  “The situation has changed,” said Sam, cutting him off.

  “May I speak?” said the one in the tweed jacket. When Sam nodded, he continued. “I’m Eugene Buckley, and this is my clan: Miriam, Dmitri, Liam, Billingsly, and Nyesha. For decades, we’ve lived in New York City.”

  “And now you want to come here,” said Sam. “Tell me why.”

  “Our contract with the demon we serve just ran out, and we don’t want to renew with him. It came to my attention that you did not yet have a clan in your service, so it seemed like a good possible match—”