And Lucy. Where was Lucy? I didn’t hear anything, couldn’t sense if she was around, and that unraveled all my carefully calmed nerves and sent me near to sputtering.
I shrieked, and discovered I had been gagged, so all that came out of my mouth was a muffled nothing.
I struggled against it, and was quickly stopped. A strong arm clamped down around my waist, then a voice came at me, seemingly from everywhere at once:
“Calm down. Stop moving. You’re only going to make it worse for yourself.”
After a final, defiant and useless bucking, like I was a horse trying to throw off anything that was on me, I stopped. I did not, however, calm down. My breathing was going faster and faster, and my head began to feel swimmy. I was sure I was going to pass out, and I couldn’t, because my sister… Argh!
“Calm down,” the voice came again. It was so strange - it sounded like the voice of a person on TV whose identity is being disguised. They’d be in all black on the screen, their voice would sound like it was going through a machine, so you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
Odder still is that it sounded like it was coming through speakers mounted up on the top of the walls, but I could feel the speaker behind me, even feel his breath on the back of my neck as he spoke. What in the world was going on?
“I am going to remove your gag, and you are not going to scream. It won’t do you any good to scream, because this room is completely soundproofed. All right?”
I nodded, as vigorously as my fatigue and panic would let me.
“Okay,” he said, and he pulled away the gag.
I took in a deep breath, and tried to look around, but there was still nothing to see. My eyes were not adjusting at all to the darkness. I might as well have just kept them closed. Something was familiar about all of this - not the situation, but in the feeling.
And I realized that I was being kept blind by magic. The ropes around my arms and legs were very real, of course, and the room was just a room, but everything else had the slight inconsistency with reality that magic always had. The smell was a different smell than normal, the sounds were off. Whoever had captured me had cast a spell on their voice to make it different, on the room to make it dark. Time to test my idea.
“I need to tell you something,” I said, my voice barely audible.
“What?” the magicked-voice bellowed out. Whoever was doing it was not good at control - everything the voice said came out at the same volume.
“Tell you something,” I whispered again.
I could feel whoever it was come around the chair and settle themselves down, not quite close enough to my ear that I could go all bitey on them, but close enough to hear a whisper. I felt it, but there was no change whatsoever in what I saw. Even in the darkness, you can usually tell when something is moving around in front of you. That is, in a natural darkness. Magical darkness has its own rules to follow, but they aren’t the rules of nature.
“Well?” the voice bellowed.
“Listen closely,” I said, so low even I could barely make it out. Then, when I was pretty sure that my captor had their ear practically right up to my mouth, I took in a deep breath and shrieked at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even say anything, I just screamed with all the power of female indignation and disgust at my predicament.
The voice screamed along with me, and then it cut out, as did the complete darkness. An experienced witch would have been able to keep the spell going even as their brains were knocking about in their heads. That the darkness and silence flickered told me I was not dealing with an experienced witch.
I barely saw the shape of my captor as he buckled away from me like I’d just poked him in the eye. But what little I saw told me a number of things. First, that my captor was no kind of “he” at all, but a woman. And, though the darkness only parted for an instant, it was a woman I had seen before, at least in outline.
This was whoever had jumped out of Wilhelm Spengler’s balcony. This was… right now, at least, prime suspect number one.
“Don’t do that!” the distorted voice bellowed again, making my eardrums throb.
“Well, you got me all trussed up with no place to go, why shouldn’t I do that?” I said, practically growling.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, which sounded oh so sincere with a voice that could have come from the evil robot villain of any sci-fi movie.
“You’ve knocked me out, you’ve tied me up, you’ve violated all of my rights, every last one and some I probably don’t even know about. How is that not hurting me?”
There was a pause, where I supposed my kidnapper was thinking about what to say. I was thinking about who this person could be - not specifically, since how would I know? But in the grand scheme of things, as a part of the whole trip. It would make sense to me that she brought the demon that Hank had saved me from… except that it made just as much sense that she and Hank could be secretly working together, and that the entire thing with the demon was a complete trick.
But it would have been a very good trick, and this was not a very good witch. More to think about…
“Because if I wanted to hurt you, you wouldn’t need to make up some list of things I was doing to you, you’d be just hurting.”
“Hmph,” I said. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, if you laid hand one on my sister, I’m going make sure that you pay for it in every possible way.”
“Lucy’s fine. She’s not even here.”
I sighed with relief, then realized what she’d said. She knew Lucy’s name. She came into the shop without any trouble. She… hmm… some small piece of the puzzle was missing, and I needed to know what—
My train of thought was broken by me suddenly becoming wet. Freezing, smelly water suddenly splashed in my face, splattering my eyes, getting in my nose, some of it trickling in my mouth.
“Agh! Blah! What are you doing?” I sputtered.
“Testing you,” she said. And then waited and watched while I spat and was angry and thrashed around a little. It was getting exhausting, pulling at my muscles, being all tied up like this.
And tomorrow Trish and Randall are coming in for the final tasting and if I’m all tied up I can’t get ready for it. Man, that’s, like, totally not fair!
“What are you testing me for?” I asked, angrily. “Whether I like getting yucky water thrown in my face? No, no I don’t!”
“Hmm,” the voice said, which would have been a low rumble if this dumb witch could get her magic straight, but was instead just as super-loud as her shouting. “Not bubbling, but more belligerent than usual. Might need to try cold iron.”
And then something frigid and hard slapped against my cheek, not quite hard enough to draw blood but hard enough to smart something awful.
“Ow!”
“That hurt? It burns, doesn’t it, demon? Well, I know just how to pull you out of there, and if you’ve hurt her…”
Since I started baking my own stuff in the tea shop and not had not relied entirely on the local bakery (though I would never be able to outdo their fresh breads and croissants, and those I still had brought in fresh every day I was open) I began to conceptualize the process of thinking kind of like baking. It required the precise right ingredients, in the right proportions, and then you put them in the oven and leave them alone for the precise right amount of time.
Well, the oven in my brain just cooked up all the ingredients of this ugly and weird situation, and I knew just what was happening at the moment. What it meant for all my other problems would have to wait.
“Oh, heck, Sibyl, is that you?” I said.
There was a long pause. She swallowed, and it was amplified terribly over the magic speakers, or whatever the heck she was using.
“Of course not,” the voice said, much more tentative than it had said anything before. “And I’m not telling a demon my name, in either case. Who’s Sybil?”
“Head of the PTA, hardest working mom in Lafay, and a great big stupid hyp
ocrite!” I shouted.
“I am not a… Sybil. At all. Though she sounds great.”
Of course. For all of the righteous fury that should have filled me, the just incredible anger at what my sister did, the fact that this was Sibyl meant, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing had happened to Lucy. I could breathe a sigh of relief.
Phew. Now that that was over…
“I do not care what your explanation for this nonsense is, Sibyl, but you have to stop it right now.”
Another interminable, completely dark pause. Then she splashed more water on me. This time, I took the opposite tack and stayed as still as possible, just shaking my head.
Then, all at once, the darkness went away, to be replaced by a blindingly white flashlight being shoved right in my face, like Sibyl had just decided to go from whatever the heck she’d been doing to impromptu dentistry.
“Hmm… all right,” she said, though she seemed a tad reluctant to give up on such a dramatic theory. “It looks like you’re not a demon, or possessed by a demon.”
Then she untied me, and opened the door out of the shed. It wasn’t until the door was opened I realized that I was indeed just in the shed out back of Sibyl’s house. It was night, but not too late - I could still hear some of the neighbor kids playing outside, and the air hadn’t grown nearly as cold as it would when night got on in earnest.
“Were I a guy,” I said, standing up with a groan, “I’d have to punch you in the mouth right now.”
Sibyl looked at me, completely seriously. “I wouldn’t recommend it. Come into the house.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “After this completely ridiculous display, the last thing I’m going to do is take orders—”
“If you want to understand what’s been happening come in,” she said without looking back.
I sputtered, this time without the aid of water, then charged after my sister.
Chapter 18
Sibyl pushed in the kitchen backdoor ahead of me, and there was something about the way she moved that was different than normal. She was balanced slightly differently - her back was straighter, but she walked with her knees bent, and her feet moved heel-toe, silently stepping on the normally squeaky linoleum. I moosed in behind her like a animal out from her field, without the slightest worry about being quiet. I wanted Sibyl to shush me, to hold her finger to her lips and say something about her kids so I could lay into her about what her kids would have thought had they seen their mother tying up her own sister like a villain in an old Western.
But there was no shushing, and no evidence that the children were around. No TV playing in the front room, no repetitive kids music streaming from their rooms. Nothing.
And no Gary, either, who if he wasn’t in the garage was typically planted on his chair in the front room, with headphones on if the kids were watching TV, and with music quietly playing if they were not. No sound from him either. Surprise number one, and for all my growling and bluster, a welcome surprise. We could talk without having to use euphemisms or lower our voices, and my voice wanted to get pretty loud.
A less welcome surprise was Lucy being there, sitting at the end of the table, looking… calm. Too calm, like she wasn’t worried at all about the craziness that had overtaken a sister who, at that moment, was settling her equipment on the table - a canteen, a large, thick iron nail, and, most disconcerting, a big knife.
“So,” I said, looking from sister to sister without feeling much of the old sisterly love. “You knew I was locked up in the shed and getting pelted with stinky water while under the power of extremely shoddy magic, and you were sitting here, what, thinking about boys?”
“Shoddy?” Sibyl said, scowling.
“Sloppy as hell,” I said.
“She did it to me first, Mimi. It’s okay, Sibyl’s just doing her job. Nobody gets in the way of you doing your magic stuff, and Sibyl’s got her slayer stuff… and I’m young and maybe I’ll have my own stuff that’ll involve getting famous on the Internet and everyone will watch my monetized music videos.”
If she was trying to lighten the mood, it was not to be lightened. This was dark and ugly and stupid stuff and I wasn’t going to stand for it one second more.
“So you tied up our little sister and assaulted her first, huh?”
“Mimi, things are too important right now to have any amateurs messing around, and you two were both stepping right in the middle. It’s bad enough that you had to spend time with that demon summoner, who could have infected your mind, but I saw some of the followers right outside the shop, trying to get in.”
“The followers?” I said, trying to think what she could mean. And then I knew, precisely, and for what seemed like the tenth time that day my eyes wanted to bug completely out of my head and go down the block. “The Weirdos! You didn’t do anything to them, did you? You didn’t—”
“No, while I was inside the shop securing my idiot sisters, they got away,” she said, folding her arms and looking down her nose at me most imperiously. She could do it, too, and there are times in my young life when I’d received that look and turned into a little puddle, pushing my toe into the ground and muttering things she couldn’t hear about how “when I grew up, things would be different.”
Well, I was grown up. And things were different. She pulled out a chair for me, and I didn’t even look at it. Just looked at her.
“Before we start,” I said, “Where are Gary and the kids?”
“Pizza party, and then a movie after. I made him promise to keep the kids away so we could have a sisters night and patch things up. And we’re not starting anything. This is the end - you do not do any more meddling. And you don’t lead this kid down your demonic path. I swore an oath to protect against demons…”
“My demonic path?” I practically shouted. “You mean magic. Which is what you were doing in the shed, only you were doing it really, really badly. Like you’d never listened when a world class witch was telling you just how it was done.”
“Guys,” Lucy said.
“This isn’t playing with herbs and turning in circles and doing nonsense. This is serious stuff. Some of these spells need the real ingredients: newt eye, scorpion tails…”
I grinned wide and winked at Lucy. She just looked uncomfortably away from me.
“Well, even if it is big girl magic, Sibyl, you did it all wrong. A little shout from me and your concentration went away, the magic stopped and if I’d had something ready I could have put the whammy on you.”
“But you didn’t,” she said. “And couldn’t. “Look it’s decided. From here on out, no more magic.”
“Sibyl, I think you should—” Lucy started, but I wouldn’t wait.
“Oh, and how are you going to stop me?” I said, keeping my eyes right on hers, not relenting my gaze for an instant.
“You think I can’t?” Sibyl said, stepping closer.
“Not with that weak magic you’ve been pulling out of cereal boxes or getting off of ignorant forums on the Internet or whatever nonsense that you—”
“A man died to give me this magic!” Sibyl practically shrieked.
“I knew it,” I said, feeling a little smug, because I’d had it planned - I wanted her to admit she’d taken the book of power. I wanted her to say she was using the very thing she’d hated, what she’d threatened and cajoled me away from using (unsuccessfully, because of my own little bit of iron will) she was now indulging in. Badly. “So, show me the book.”
“Yes, Sibyl,” Lucy said, “Show us the book.”
Sibyl scowled at me, then turned her attention to the littlest sister. “Lucy, please, none of this concerns you. Just… just…”
“Just what, pretend that we’re not a family of witches that have magic trouble every other way we turn?” Lucy said, splaying her hands out in a gesture that indicated complete futility. “And become a big liar like my two older sisters?”
“Yeah,” I started, before I fully heard what she said. “Wait a minute, what? Wh
o you calling a liar, kid?”
“The woman who told me I need to learn about magic for my own protection and to save my mind and soul and everything else, but who doles it in such small portions, I’m pretty sure I know less now than when I was just goofing off with a bunch of high school kids.”
Lucy could barely keep eye contact with me through her little speech, and had to break it at the end. Yes, she broke it. It wasn’t me, feeling slightly ashamed at what she was saying.
“Look, there are reasons—” I began.
“There’s always reasons. Sibyl has her own reasons for hiding this slayer stuff from both of us our entire lives while saying she wanted a normal life.”
“Whoa, there, I do want a normal life,” Sibyl said.
“Nothing’s more normal than being part of a secret war against demonkind while keeping your family, including your grandmother who knows magic better than most people in the world, completely in the dark,” Lucy said, plainly.
“It’s for your own protection—”
“Sure protected Mimi last night when a demon who was probably chasing after you came after her.”
Sibyl fumed, standing with her arms tense at her sides, shaking like they were about to… I don’t know. Go all crazy slayer or something.
“Lucy, you’re just a kid—”
“Yes, I am. I’m a goofy kid and I’ve been trying real hard to be more than that, despite my supposedly loving, guiding sisters’ best efforts.” I’m sure she didn’t mean for them to, but her eyes were suddenly welled up with tears, and they rolled down her face, enormous and making her cheeks shine red.
“Lucy,” I said, my voice filled with the heartbreak I was feeling right then.
“And even when I try to do good by both of you, I make a bunch of cookies that turn people into TV worshiping zombies with bad haircuts… I didn’t do any magic in the house, Sibyl, not even a little, what do you call it? A little simple trick? A cantrip?” she said.
“I think it’s only in Dungeons and Dragons magic is called cantrips,” Sibyl said, completely seriously.
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 14
