Return Of The Witch (The Witch Next Door Book 6)

by Judith Berens

  She turned and tapped her nose. “And I don’t even have to sniff it out.”

  “Oh, very funny. I have you beat with finding someone else’s magic, though.”

  “Touché.” She went up to the front, slid into the passenger seat, and snatched his phone from the center console. “Next step—find the temple of Oneiroi. It can’t be that far because we’re in Greece.”

  “That feels like saying every single town in the US has a Burger King.”

  “Please tell me that’s not your temple, Romeo.”

  “It’s someone’s.” He fell back into the driver’s seat beside her and watched her growing frustration as she Googled ‘temple of Oneiroi’ and couldn’t find what she wanted.

  “My faith in Wikipedia is nonexistent, now.” She looked at him and handed the device over. “We’re in need of your skills, I think.”

  “It only takes a little practice to find what you’re actually looking for. Not like I’m gonna compare my ability to research stuff with your spellcasting.”

  “Hardy har.” Lily propped her feet up on the dashboard—which meant she had to slide down in the seat after one of the Atlantic Maiden’s crew had lost a bet and owed Romeo more legroom in the Winnie. “I’m actually looking forward to seeing this Varelos. Something the Vátra want that badly has to be really cool.”

  Romeo glanced up at her from his phone as she clasped her hands behind her head. “Really cool and probably really impossible to get if the Royal wants an Optatus witch to retrieve it for him.” He clicked through a few more links on his phone and snorted. “You look like me right now. You know that, right?”

  She startled, realized her very Romeo-like position, and grinned. “Maybe I’m merely channeling my inner wolf.”

  “Nice try. It’s gonna take a lot more than looking cool.”

  Lily snorted. “Have you found anything yet?”

  “Actually, yeah.” With a grin, he turned his phone around to face her and wiggled it. “You didn’t expect that answer, did you?”

  “You constantly surprise me.” She took the device from him and scanned what he’d pulled up. “A temple for Pasithea? She’s the goddess of rest and relaxation. How is that the same thing?”

  “That’s what it is now. Read the rest.”

  She scanned the article, sliding her finger up the screen over and over while she focused on the text. “Who wrote this?”

  “A local. The family’s been in the area for a long time, and those are the legends of his ancestors according to the title. But the guy sounds serious about it in his writing.”

  “A temple that used to be for Oneiroi and now converted into a sacred place to pray to the exact opposite.” The young witch glanced through the article one last time, nodded, and handed Romeo his phone again. “It sounds like a good place to hide something.”

  “Exactly where no one would think to look.” Romeo slid his phone into the cupholder in the center console. “Except for us.”

  “How did you get so good at finding this stuff?”

  He shrugged. “I told you, Lil. Practice. I started with finding places that were safe for my dad and I to shift and run around for a weekend. That got fairly hard to do once Charleston started booming as the place for everyone to be.”

  “I imagine Julian Stephens as the kind of man with a bumper sticker along the lines of, ‘Yanks can’t handle the South.’”

  Romeo chuckled. “That’s close enough.”

  “So how far away is this temple of Oneiroi?”

  “About an hour. Closer than the long-shot shipyards.”

  Lily slipped her feet off the dash, straightened in the passenger seat, and buckled her seatbelt. “It’s a shorter drive. And half an hour across the Mediterranean is a heck of a lot faster than a two-day boat ride.”

  He strapped himself in and started the engine. “Here’s to the fast track with Lily Antony.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  The Winnie’s tires crunched over the salt-crusted gravel and back onto E09, headed north for the town of Petas.

  When they reached Petas a little short of an hour later, the sun was almost directly overhead. Romeo eased them into the parking lot of a gas station and pulled the keys out of the ignition. “I think we have to walk from here.”

  “I like it.” Lily unbuckled her seatbelt and stood. “I wouldn’t want people driving their cars onto sacred ground in my town, either. What would that be back home? Like the Angel Oak?”

  “Yeah, there’s special parking. I think they might have closed it off, though, so you can’t simply hang out on the tree.”

  They moved toward the Winnie’s side door, and she turned around to shoot him a surprised glance before she opened the latch. “Seriously?”

  “Yep. There was a weird story in the paper a few years ago about someone doing Satanic rituals and making sacrifices right next to the tree. It turns out it was some lady burying her dog or something, but the county apparently wanted to ‘do something’ about it.”

  “It might’ve been an actual witch, too.”

  He shrugged. “Who knows?” They stepped out into the parking lot, and Romeo locked the side door before he pocketed the keys. “I guess you can’t walk through the ruins of Brick House anymore, either. For preservation reasons, I guess.”

  “That’s on one of the plantations in Edisto, right?”

  Romeo nodded. “It’s a weird contrast, right? We’re driving around a country way older than where we’re from, and people are still going to the same temples and praying to the same gods, and none of it’s closed to major traffic.”

  “At least not this one. I bet there’s something somewhere that’s off-limits simply so no one destroys it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hey.” Lily pointed at the convenience store and shrugged. “I would definitely be down for some hunting for magical artifacts fuel. Wanna grab something?”

  “Do you even know me?” Romeo spread his arms and smirked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  They reached the store and he held the door open for her. The little bell tied to the handle dinged when they stepped inside. “Okay.” He rubbed his hands together. “Brainfood—or magic food, maybe—for a side quest. What’s Greece got on the menu?”

  “Moussaka to go?” Lily nodded at the hot bar next to the drink coolers.

  “I’m so down with a mini buffet in the middle of nowhere.” He hurried forward to serve them a few to-go boxes, and Lily scanned the drinks in the row of coolers in case anything stood out. I haven’t had a Red Bull in forever. I can’t believe how quickly that dropped off my necessities list. A shimmering purple can caught her attention and she reached out for the handle of the cooler door. The minute her fingers curled around the metal, a spear of burning agony seared through her chest directly below the hollow of her throat between her collarbones.

  She couldn’t move and couldn’t even cry out as the pain wracked her entire body and arched her back right there in the convenience store. A dark image flashed in her vision—the shape of a bird, its wings outstretched and curling at the tips with black smoke. As quickly as it appeared, the pain vanished.

  Her fingers slid from the door handle and she gasped. She stared through the glass and saw nothing on the other side. “What…” Her voice came out sounding like someone was choking her, and she swallowed. A wave of dizziness washed over her, and she pressed her hand against the glass to keep herself from falling forward. What was that? She leaned forward and touched her forehead to the cooler door, breathing heavily and hoping something cold on her head would help her think straight.

  “All right.” Romeo walked toward her with a large to-go box in each hand and looked at each of them with hunger and a little bit of pride in what he’d put together. “We have a box of moussaka and something that looks like build-your-own gyros. That’s probably not right, but I’m working with what they have and it’s gonna be delicious anyway. Did you find a—Lily?” He s
et the boxes on a shelf of packaged foods and rushed toward her. “Hey, what happened?” When he caught her shoulders gently, she was shaking.

  “I don’t know.” Lily took a deep breath and pulled her head away from the cooler. “I felt something—”

  “I can only assume it was a bad something.” He studied her quickly and removed her hand from the cooler door to turn her toward him. “How bad?”

  She blinked and had a hard time focusing her vision completely. But she looked at him and was able to center herself when she locked onto those green eyes flecked with gold—and now, serious concern. “Bad. On a scale of one to ten, I’d probably call it a nine-point-seven.” The werewolf’s brows drew together, and he examined her again. “I’m fine now, I think.” Lily rubbed her throat and the top of her chest and found a little relief in the feel of the silver-framed mirror charm on the chain around her neck—her mom’s first clue and one of the most powerful magical artifacts Lily had ever used. “It felt like someone was trying to cut into me. Right here.” She tapped below her throat. “And…take something out.”

  He rubbed her arms and glanced around the convenience store. “Okay. Maybe you should lie down for a minute. We can buy food later.”

  “Romeo, I’m fine.” She smiled at him, swallowed painfully, and nodded. “It’s gone now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. Let’s buy the food for now and work out what’s going on later.” She tried to smile again, but it felt unnaturally forced. “I still need to eat.”

  “Right.” He hesitated before he released her and turned to retrieve the boxes from the shelf. They paid for the food as quickly as possible and exited to walk toward the Winnie. The little bell jingled again before the door closed behind them.

  Outside, under the building heat of a late-summer sun in Greece, Lily closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, she realized how much she didn’t want to be inside the Winnie. “How about we sit out here and eat?”

  Romeo stopped and shot her a confused look. “Uh, yeah. We can do that. I only…” He looked around them and studied the narrow street before he gestured across it. “Does the bench over there sound good?”

  “Yeah.” The roads were almost completely empty in the middle of the day, and they crossed the street to an open area too small to be a park but with too many trees and potted plants to merely be a pretty installation. And there were benches. She tried not to drop herself too quickly onto the seat. I feel like I’m gonna hurt something all over again.

  He sat beside her, opened the boxes of food quietly, and handed her a plastic fork. They took a few minutes to simply eat instead of talking with their meal, and she barely tasted their lunch. Finally, she set the fork down inside the box of moussaka and leaned against the bench. “I definitely feel better now.”

  Her companion shoveled a huge forkful of lamb into his mouth, chewed quickly, and swallowed. “Better enough to tell me what that was in there?”

  “Better enough to say I don’t know how it’s possible or why it happened. But I think I…” She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “I think I felt my mom.”

  Nine

  Romeo set his utensils in the box and cleared his throat. “You think you felt her?”

  “Yeah. Or at least what she felt. I know, it doesn’t even make sense, but that’s what I’m going with.”

  He blinked slowly and exhaled a long, slow breath. “There’s a reason you made that connection, Lil. What did you see?”

  “Only a shadow-bird. I didn’t cast it, but it could’ve been mine. Could’ve been hers too.” She shrugged and stared at the gravel path at their feet. “I can’t really tell the difference unless a raven made of black smoke literally blasts out of my body.”

  “Okay.” He smoothed the dark curls away from his forehead and nodded slowly. “So you can feel your mom’s pain now. That’s a new one.”

  “I know. And I don’t know how she’s still—” She swallowed and shook her head. “I’m not sure I could stay strong through something like this for as long as she has.”

  Leaning toward her, he bumped her shoulder with his and gave her a small, reassuring smile. “Sure you could. You’re her daughter, and you’re the one who’s gonna find her and get her out of that mess. You can handle anything, Lil.”

  “I guess I’m gonna hafta handle vicarious torture, too.” With a deep breath, she pulled herself deliberately out of her confusion and pointed at the open box on her lap. “Do you want any more of this?”

  “I’m good right now. This’ll make excellent leftovers, though.”

  “For sure.” She closed the box and rose slowly to her feet. “We can stash the leftovers in the fridge and move up to that temple. And now, we simply have one more reason to get this Varelos as fast as we can and make the deal to get us into Libya.”

  With the food stored and the Winnie locked again, they made their way along the other side of the small not quite park and past some kind of municipal building toward the hills rising ahead of them on the north side of Petas. A dirt path wound up through the short grass, bushes, and all the cypress trees. The higher they climbed, the thicker the vegetation grew around them.

  “Well, this is a nice, private path to a temple,” Lily muttered as she trudged ahead of Romeo.

  “You know, I like the fact that it makes it harder for people to see us.” He pulled his arm away from a particularly prickly bush that stretched its branches over the path. “But it’s not so great that we can’t see anyone else.”

  “You’re kinda starting to sound like a bodyguard.”

  He snorted. “If I didn’t already know that you don’t need anyone to protect you, Lil, I’d go ahead and say I am your bodyguard.”

  “You wouldn’t have been very effective, though, if you couldn’t get out of that Vátran dive suit without me.”

  “And that’s why I’m not your bodyguard.”

  The path became much steeper after that, and she breathed heavily despite knowing she was already in decent shape. “This really looked like nothing more than a hill from where we parked.” Romeo merely grunted behind her and didn’t say anything.

  Ten minutes later, the thick cypresses thinned enough down the path for them to catch a glimpse of white stone and what looked like a manmade wall. “Please tell me this is it.” Romeo stopped on the trail, lowered his head, and put both hands on his hips for a little breather. “This hill or mountain or whatever can’t be that high, but I’m really feeling it.”

  “Yeah, me too.” She turned to look at him and the sweat stains that darkened the color of his t-shirt in patches. “Are you okay?”

  “Yep.” He wiped his sweaty forehead with his arm and nodded. “It looks like we made it, anyway.”

  They hadn’t reached the top of the mountain, but the path leveled off and a few moments later, they stepped through the branches thick with leaves and walked into the middle of a decent-sized clearing. In the center was a one-story building, although three of its four sides were open to the outside air. The slanted roof was held up by white pillars on three sides, and the fourth was the only completely solid wall.

  “That looks like a temple to me.” Lily stepped across the green-brown grass and the piles of larger stones, all of them overgrown with small bushes and weeds. “And someone’s obviously come here to do some gardening.” She gestured toward the tiny stone pool outside the temple’s entrance and to the left, which was ringed with colorful flowers. There was water in it, but it was murky and completely still above the algae-slickened stone beneath it. The pool and the temple looked like the only parts of the clearing that had been touched at all and where the sprouts of weeds and dry grasses and tree branches didn’t grow.

  “This would probably be more than a one-person job on a regular basis.” Romeo stepped past her to peer into the pool. “No one touched the water, though.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t either.”

  He whirled to shoot her a surprised gla
nce. “Why not?”

  She gestured at the temple and the entire clearing around them. “We were sent here by the leader of an underwater race to recover his most precious artifact that I assume was stolen and hidden somewhere in or around the temple.” She followed that up with a shrug. “It’s only a hunch.”

  The werewolf glanced at the water again, shoved his hands into his pockets, and joined her at the threshold into the temple itself. “So do you think the place might be booby trapped or something?”

  Lily licked her lips and cast him a sideways glance. “Did you really say booby trapped?”

  Romeo fought not to laugh. “That’s what it’s called. Okay, fine. Rigged with magic? Warded? Dangerous?”

  “Any of those is a thousand times better.” The young witch rubbed her hands before she clapped them and kept them pressed together. “It’s time to find out.” The glowing pink light of her illusion-discovery spell shimmered between her spreading palms, and she jerked her hands away to release a bright flash of pink light. It filled the entire structure from floor to ceiling and illuminated a few lines of glowing silver on the far wall. In a moment, all the light faded and vanished.

  With a little chuckle, he scratched the side of his head. “I no sooner feel like I know what your spells are for and you use them in a completely different way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Usually, that pink light’s for finding the Winnie after we hide it.”

  She gestured to the only solid wall in the back. “And it found what someone else left behind too but no wards or rigged magic. And definitely, no booby traps.” She snorted and moved forward. He simply shook his head with a smirk and followed her, his hands still thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans.

  Lily knelt in front of the back wall where she’d seen the lines of silver light up under her spell. Beside her, centered against the white stone wall, was a square stone platform about two feet tall. Romeo stopped in front of it and nodded. “Do you think something else was stolen from the temple?”