We both stared at each other and Sybil finally stuttered out a confession of sorts.
“Okay, I had some kids who helped me in high school and one of them was a big nerd and I played a sorceress. A half-elf sorceress named…”
She stopped, and turned completely beet red.
“Named what?” I said.
“I’ll die before I tell you.”
“Sibylania?” I offered.
“Glorfindelere?” Lucy said.
“Pixie Pants?”
“Halfy the Half-elf?”
“Joe?”
And then we were all doubled up, laughing, practically shrieking with it.
That was the end of the fight. That was the end of the long contretemps between sisters. I’m not going to pretend it was all, or even much, smooth sailing between the three of us, but the world of tension that had built up from months of me running a tea shop Sibyl wanted closed, doing magic she apparently despised, it all broke right then.
I went to get some coffee going, while Sibyl and Lucy chatted about elf names. The best one I heard was Elf-Faced AwesomeEars, which had to be Lucy’s. But like the constant interloper against fun that I was, I had to come in with the serious stuff.
“Sibyl, for serious and true, what do you think is going on?”
Her demeanor immediately shifted back to the stiff-necked, stiff-backed trained warrior who had convinced us all she was a possible Olympic hopeful in gymnastics and that’s why she had to spend to much time in the gym. Then she took a breath, and the Slayer girl did not answer my question. My sister did.
“There’s a lot about demons you don’t understand unless you meet up with them. It isn’t like in TV shows or movies where they can just come into the world, all pointy horns and sulfur, and take over people. It’s a lot of effort for them to even move a pencil on a table, let alone possess a human. To them our world is like… uh… how to put it…”
“It’s like diving into the ocean?” I offered. “You can be prepared for it in all kinds of ways, but when it comes down to it, that’s not your environment?”
“Yes, exactly,” Sibyl said, looking at me with that sense of renewed respect which made me wonder what the heck she’d thought of me before. I certainly wasn’t going to let her know that I got the analogy from the man she was convinced murdered her mentor.
And how do you know she’s wrong? I thought, without any kind of good reply.
“Okay, I don’t understand?” Lucy said. “If they’re not even that powerful, how do they get people hurt? Or get worshipers, like you thought those weirdos were today?”
“Thought? Hold on a second, those weren’t… you said something about cookies turning people into… I need an explanation,” Sibyl said, falling back into her imperious unpleasant mode.
“Later. First, what was this Wilhelm guy doing, coming to you?” I said.
Sibyl was not used to open sharing and everybody getting on the same page. She’d had a secret for more than half of her life, and giving something like that up was like learning a language when you’re an adult: you can certainly do it, but it ain’t easy, child. And it takes a lot of breaking of habits.
“Wilhelm was my mentor, I told you. He was also my trainer and my spotter.”
“Spotter?” I said.
“He would keep his antenna out for demon activity in our sector, and if he spotted anything he would come up with plausible cover stories, and get me to where I needed to be. If I needed to be going through Oregon forests looking for a hidden demon, or in the Mojave desert for a demon-worshiper’s compound, he was the one who got me there. When I grew too old to do the work…”
“Wait, how did you get too old for it?” I said.
She looked at me, and squirmed a bit. “Well, it’s not an age limit, exactly, but… at a point in your life you need to move on and you no longer have the characteristics of—”
“Oh my God!” I said, clapping my hands to my mouth. “You have to be a—” I moved my hands down from my mouth and clamped them down on Lucy’s ears, who squirmed under my grip as I mouthed the word Sibyl didn’t want me to: “a virgin?”
She pursed her lips and didn’t look at me, so I knew the answer right then.
“So many questions. Like… hmm… why?”
“I guess it’s like your magic. It isn’t science, it has supernatural and extra-spiritual dimensions and… let’s get off this topic, okay?”
“All right,” I said, letting Lucy’s ears go.
“I heard everything,” Lucy said, with a certain smugness to her tone which made me pretty sure she hadn’t heard a thing.
“So I had stopped and Wilhelm didn’t have anything else to do in town, so he left. To find another one with my capabilities, I suppose. Which at the time was fine with me. I married Gary and started a family and it was all done until… well, until you guys came back, I guess.”
“Hmm… so why did Wilhelm maintain a house here in the town?”
“He didn’t,” Sibyl said.
“But he did. I visited it with Max.”
I told her about the place, about the feeling that pervaded it. Just then, Lucy practically screamed. We both shot up from the table, Sibyl striking a fighting pose, me in more of a general, fearful crouch. Hey, I think I’ve already proved that when it comes to fighting, Mimi’s not where it’s at. I’ve got a completely different set of skills.
“What?” Sibyl shouted.
“I’ve walked by that place! When you had me deliver sample menus to that Trish woman, I walked right by that house and… oh, I remember it. I think I felt the same thing, the sort of whispering. In fact…”
Lucy lost herself in the middle of a thought, tracing ideas with her eyes while she looked at none of us.
“In fact what, kid?” I said.
“In fact… it was just before I started making the cookies. I was trying to think of some way to help the business, and to learn my magic, because I wanted to show you,” she said, pointing to me, “That I’m not at all about voodoo dolls and hurting people. And you,” her finger moved to Sibyl, “that I’m not a little kid who can’t do anything to help the family. When I left there, I had the whole thing in my head. Magic cookies.”
She blinked. “Which proved me wrong and you guys right after all.” Then she shifted downwards into a little cute storm cloud, her face practically disappearing in a mess of frizzy, drooping hair.
I scooted my chair closer to her so I could give her a hug and tell her all kinds of things about how nothing was her fault and she was trying too hard and we appreciated her and all that jazz. Sibyl just sat, hand on her chin, thinking.
“It could be… that’s one of the ways, the major ways, that demons influence people,” she said. “They whisper into their ear. Demons becoming real physical things in the world, that takes major strength. Far easier is being a spirit, a presence that can see your deepest needs and know just what to tell you to make you go for them in the wrong way.”
“And Trish Tarkington lives right next door,” I said, rubbing my chin. “But she told me she never went over there.”
“Ugh, of all the people that we had to do our first wedding for, why did it have to be that nasty b… broad,” Lucy said.
“Language,” Sibyl said, automatically.
“Yeah, I wonder what in the world Max ever saw in her.”
Lucy’s mouth flew open. “OMG, they used to date? I gotta hear this tea.”
We both looked at her in complete bland incomprehension.
“Tea. You know, gossip.”
“Well, then shouldn’t it be ‘G’?” I said.
“No, it’s… I heard it on Real Housewives,” Lucy said, looking sheepish, like she’d put her foot wrong in the dance of female gossip.
“Real Housewives?” Sibyl said, and her jaw dropped. “Where did you watch that nonsense? Because if it was in this house anywhere near where my babies—”
“Focus, Sib. Who cares about Trish? We’re talking demons.”
But if what Sibyl was saying about demons was true, we might have to think about Trish. She had never been an important figure in my life until about two months ago when she came to me asking for a high tea at her wedding and became one of the most important figures in my life. For professional reasons I was ready to believe she walked on water and all kinds of other lovely important things. Almost daily interaction with her, little by little, ground down that positive impression of her.
She was pretty, though, and had confidence. Can’t fight that. And maybe under a demon’s curse? Well, that just kind of humanized her right there, didn’t it? Humanized by demonization. There was a joke in there somewhere…
“We’ve lost Mimi,” Lucy said. “Maybe you should bring out the book.”
“The what?” Sibyl said, but she was smiling. She stepped out of the room, and Lucy and I looked at each other in surprise. Maybe the big sister was finally trusting the little ones.
Before I saw the book that Sibyl had placed in front of me, I could feel it. The magic came off of it like heat from a fresh baked lasagna, moving in waves I could feel sure as I could feel steam off of baking tray.
It had a smell, of course, because it was an old book, but that smell had something very distinct on top of it, like heat. My nose hairs prickled, and when I looked at it chills ran down my entire body.
It was very thin. I might have expected something that looked like it weighed ten pounds and was made of mottled leather, curled and dusty with age. This was just an old book. Bound in leather, yes, old and cracked, but the leather was very plain. No ornamentations, no metal embellishments. Just black. Not even a title burned or stitched into the leather.
I reached out to touch it, but my fingers hovered above it - again, as if I was afraid it was hot, and would burn.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Sibyl said, and she reached around me and flipped it open.
I flinched, as if sparks were going to shoot from the pages.
But nothing did. The magic was there, I could feel it plainly, but the pages could have come out of some modern exercise manual. No photographs of impossibly beautiful and skinny people, but the layout was the same. Drawings, with the awkward perspectives and forms of old illustrations, depicting a man wearing black tight clothes and a metal helmet moving his body into positions. Text filled out the pages beside the illustrations, and there was lots and lots of text. Titles in bold, gothic print, spelling out what each of these positions was meant to accomplish.
I guessed. It was all in German. Probably some medieval German dialect. Which, I don’t think I need to over state, I cannot read. And neither could Sibyl… could she?
“So… this is a spell book. These spells don’t use the same kind of ingredients mine do, but they do something else,” I said, pointing to a list besides one set of illustrations that looked like a cross between jumping jacks and someone trying to pull themselves into the air using their ears. The list had numbers by it, which looked to me like units of measurements.
Ingredients. Spell book. Spells which Sybil had, without any instruction, been trying to use on me.
“Do you know what can happen if a spell-casting goes awry?” I said to her, keeping my voice calm though I was feeling like getting very upset again.
“Mimi, two-way street,” Lucy said, forestalling my probably not-to-be-well-received lecture.
Sibyl went on. “I promised to take the book and some other things from him, and keep it safe until he could take it back. That’s all. I didn’t intend to ever look at it, or… I put them in a safe place, that night… then heard right when I was going to bed. What happened… you said you saw me come out of the balcony, and just after that he collapsed?”
I nodded. “Bird’s eye view, literally. But none of what you’re saying explains this. You guys, Hank calls them Malties…”
“Do. Not. Call. Me. A. Maltese.”
Sibyl was very serious. I smiled and nodded like she wasn’t sounding crazy. “Malleus Infiwhatver, you guys hate magic. You only don’t kill witches because you haven’t gotten around to them yet, as far as I understand the whole arrangement.”
“That is a gross oversimplification. But… we had these spells created for performing our task of rescuing people from demonic possession. They create an isolated place so that the people can be held and observed without being a danger to themselves or the Slayer.”
“So, what would have happened to me if you’d decided I was demon chow?” I said, suddenly feeling a little sick. “Slay me?”
“Never,” Sibyl said, still completely serious. “I’d cast the demon out, do everything in my power to help you without hurting you.”
That didn’t seem like a satisfactory answer to me at all, and I wanted to argue it… but we were working on baby steps here. I could be patient and dislike things quietly… for now.
“Okay, and then what? The demon disappears forever?”
Sibyl shook her head. “A demon cast out of a human would find its lair, and regroup there. It takes a very complex ritual to actually get a demon out of this world, and one I couldn’t even do on my own, not now. I’d have to bind it first, then call in some heavy hitters to actually remove it.”
“Bind it? Like, tie it up?” Lucy said.
“Metaphysically, yes. Sanctified blood of the innocent freely given is the main ingredient. Put some of that on the door, or one of the walls inside, and it’s like putting a triple knotted bind on the thing.”
“And then you have to wait for more Maltie… more of your people? What, you didn’t take the time to learn the whole thing? Was it too magicky for you?”
“No, because it wasn’t my place,” Sibyl said, her voice rising. “Unlike some people I respect what I’ve been taught.”
“Respect? Since when did you respect Grand-Mere, who spent so much time—”
“Enough fretting, or bonding, or whatever, we got stuff to do,” Lucy interjected. “We’ve got to bind this demon. What’s next?”
Chapter 19
What happened next was the door burst open, and the rest of Sibyl’s family poured into the house making all kinds of noise. Sibyl hid the book, gathered up her kids to find out just what they did with daddy… and that was it for that meeting of the forces of light against darkness. It was barely 8 o’clock, but I was exhausted from the whole ordeal. Lucy seemed ready for anything, but as far as I was concerned the only anything happening that night was an early bedtime.
I settled into my bedroom, idly wondered if I’d fed the familiar, then drifted off to sleep while trying to order everything I knew into some kind of coherent shape.
That man came here to find Sibyl for a reason. And he died, murdered somehow via pizza. He kept a house here, one that seemed to be infested by a demon, and we were going to have to find out just what the heck was up with that. That was puzzle one.
Puzzle two was Hank, and the group he worked with, whoever they were. Benevolent warlocks? That’ll be the day… except all I knew about Warlocks was some dire warnings from Grand-Mere, and a few notes in her recipe book. I’d need to look into that, too, because I so wanted to trust Hank that I probably should take that as a warning sign.
Then there was the house itself, next to Trish Tarkington. Her having anything to do with this entire mess was a complete stretch, a ridiculous idea. Except that maybe it wasn’t, because that would make her being right there on the scene while Max and I were investigating a coincidence, and I do not believe in coincidences, not where magic is involved.
Except that’s exactly what I have to watch out for with magic, not inferring cause when there is no cause. Oh this was all so infuriating! And though I was exhausted, I turned for hours, wrestling with all of it in my head.
Right on the edge of sleep, I remembered another detail. Another coincidence. The delivery boy and one of Lucy’s weirdos, both leaving the hotel at the same time. What did that mean? I thought, and then fell into sleep before I could find anything like an answer.
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It was all still rolling around in my head the next morning like cream dissolving into coffee: where for an instant there was a white ball of truth in the middle of darkness, then when it got stirred around it all dissolved into one murky color together, and nothing was at all clear. I was not in the right frame of mind to be running a tea shop.
And I certainly wasn’t ready to see Randall Grainer standing outside my shop, pacing like an expectant father. He looked at me a little cross-eyed, like he didn’t quite recognize me. I recognized him, of course, but he did look a little different. His straw colored hair wasn’t slicked to the side like it usually was, and his suit (exquisitely tailored, of course) was lacking the typical boutonniere that he usually wore. It made him look more like a normal person, not having that accoutrement, and like a nervous, harried person.
“Randall, I’m not meeting with you and Trish for another hour,” I said, “And I’m not at all set up right now.”
“Okay,” he said, and he looked seriously confused as to why I was talking to him. I smiled and stepped around him to get to my front door and invite him in. Maybe some tea would break him out of the weird funk he seemed to be under. He didn’t say anything, but did come into my store after me and looked around it, like he was trying to understand what he was looking at.
“So…” I did not ask the first question that came to mind, which was whether he’d been recently struck in the head. “Earl Gray fine?”
“I suppose,” he said, managing to sit down in a vague way, like he wasn’t really sure what chairs were for.
The best way to describe it is like a man whose just had an incredibly strenuous workout, whose arms didn’t want to go up anymore. He didn’t slump in the chair, but sat with that cow on a pasture look of someone not seeing what’s in front of him.
“Anything bothering you?” I asked, tentatively as I really didn’t want to get into it if there was. It crossed my mind for an instant that the wedding might be off. That Trish had been whisked away by demons and that just wasn’t the sort of thing that he could bring into his family. I shamefully felt a bit of relief at that idea, before I remembered that this hard work was all for my greater ambitions, that I should be doing these weddings every week.
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 15
