“Don’t get killed, Max,” I said, then I ran away.
Not completely, but I did dive away from the demon house and toward the fence, over into the yard where Trish’s parents lived. It was a wild gambit, and reckless and painful, because I dove directly into a rose bush. Most people have been pricked by thorns, I supposed, but I doubt too many people have intentionally thrust themselves into a big-old patch of them. I got stabbed and re-stabbed as I grabbed around until I found just what I was looking for, grabbing for handfuls of whatever I could find. My left hand clasped right around a stem full of thorns, and I screamed even as I was thrashing and digging.
Then two pairs of hands closed around my hips and yanked me out, which brought me in contact with more lovely thorns and hurt even worse and worse. One lucky thorn even caught my cheek and tore at it, so I could feel it bleeding when I was finally yanked to my feet.
“Do we know this girl, Davin?” an old woman said, who stood in front of me and stared at me, a little lazily. Her eyes had a bleariness to them, a vagueness undercut by the hard grip she held on my shoulders.
“No, but she’s probably a friend of Trish’s,” the old man said, whose surprisingly strong hands were still on my hips. “Probably ought to take her over to her.”
“It’s a bother,” the woman said, grabbing at my wrists and binding them together in her hands. I kept them balled into fists, and tried to pull them closer in toward my body. She kept her grip, but didn’t resist. After all, I wasn’t going anywhere.
The floral smell that came from both of them was almost overpowering. Each wore a strange wreath on their heads, a twisting crown of thorny roses. They both smiled at me, and each also had petals in their teeth, clenched there like they’d been told by a dentist to bite down on them, and wait for their X-rays.
Tonight just got a whole lot weirder.
I dragged my feet as much as I could, but for old people, Trish’s parents sure were strong, and they brought me without too much trouble through the still open door of the demon house. Randall had brought both Lucy, who struggled and cried, and Max, whose face was swollen and who barely moved, into the house just ahead of us, carrying both of them under his arms like grocery bags.
There was a short front hall, right in the house, which continued forward into a large room and cut right into something smaller, the part of the house that faced the front. It was into this smaller sort of foyer that all three of us were dragged, and where Trish was waiting for us, sitting at a wrought iron table and tapping her fake-nailed fingers impatiently on the metal.
If the curtains had been drawn, and it were day and there wasn’t the feeling of terror and dread covering over everything, then I think this room would have been a lovely place to have breakfast. Just at the moment, it was cramped and dark and had the mixed yucky smell of blood, ultra-sweet perfume, and something underneath it that I couldn’t place. Mold. Grossness. Demonstink.
Randall dropped my companions on the carpet next to me, and went to stand behind Trish.
Barely visible in the darkness broken by a single fluttering candle, standing closer to the window, was Hank. He leaned, silently, darkly, watching me without emotion.
In another chair, tied just like I had been yesterday evening, Sibyl was slumped forward. Besides a little blood on her lip, looking like scandalous lipstick, there weren’t any outward signs that she’d been hurt.
No, not yet a voice whispered, directly into my head. Oh, heck, that was a demon, wasn’t it? I don’t like that… It felt familiar, the same feeling of coldness and darkness that overwhelmed me in the yard, in the alleyway.
“So, the three sisters,” Trish said. “You know, you all don’t look alike. I think this would all look better if you had the same hair and faces, like you were the same person at various ages. It would be more aesthetic.”
“Crazy lady, quit talking crazy,” I said.
A pair of old hands grabbed my hair and pulled me back, yanking hard. I shrieked, and stared right into the milky-white stare of Trish’s mom.
“Shh, be respectful, dear,” she said in the sweetest old woman voice possible.
“The weird thing is,” Trish said, continuing on after a short pointed pause, “that the slayer was the easiest one of all of you to subdue. She came in here willingly, with this ridiculous thing, thinking she could do one of her little demon cleansing rituals with it. Right in the demon’s own home.”
She placed a weird little canister on the table, and turned it around. It was actually a pair of test tubes, both stopped. The light wasn’t great, but I think there was something thick and wet in one tube, and the other… salt and ash and something else.
“So… she was going to make a vinaigrette?” I said. “Clean the carpets? Make some Cesar salad?”
NO JOKES the demon yelled in my mind, loud enough to make me gasp and fall forward, holding my ears. It didn’t help to hold your ears when the sound is coming from inside your head. It just seems to keep the sound in more.
“No, she’s going to cleanse it, like I said. You never seem very bright, Mimi, how do you do these magic things so well? I don’t see why the Jiggs are intimidated by you at all. We’re old friends, you know, from after I got kicked out of Sibyl’s little club. I met them before they moved here, and told them all about the Auclairs. Pen pals, I think I’d call them.”
Too much was going through my mind then. Trish, some sort of colleague or protege of the Jiggs. And… leading her here… to hurt Grand-Mere.
“Well, when I deliver you and your little sister to them, maybe you’ll manage a daring escape with powers I haven’t seen yet. As it stands… just sit quietly while I get to this next part.”
She stood up, grabbed the little device and put it inside a purse she wore on her hip. “Just in case any of your dummies think you can go and be a hero and use this against me. Not gonna happen.”
Then she walked over to Sibyl, touching her gently on the forehead. She poked her again, and again, like she was trying to push her finger right through my older sister’s head. It was annoying just to see, and finally Sibyl couldn’t take it. Her eyes flicked open and with a snarl she twisted her head around, snapping like a crocodile at that fake-nail tipped long finger.
Trish shrieked and fell backwards, caught in the strong arms of her betrothed. He stood forward, wheeling back his hand to smack my sister right across the face.
“No, no, no, that’s not how we’re going to do this!” Trish said, her voice taking on a strange cadence, like she’d been speaking through a microphone, and it was just cranked up, but not coming from her mouth anymore. It was almost exactly like the spell that Sibyl had been using on me, but far more competently executed.
It stopped Randall in mid-swing, the tension in his arm making his veins stick out. He lowered his arm, and stood up straight, staring at Sibyl without much in the way of an expression. Dead-eyed. Weirdly controlled…
LIE DOWN the voice in my head commanded, just as I was getting to my feet. Then I was on the ground, entirely of my own volition, pressing my head into the carpet.
What the heck?
Then it all came together in my head, even some of the things I’d done that I didn’t understand at the time. The expression in the old woman’s face, that perfume. The pain from the trashing I’d taking by that rosebush, diving in and grabbing a handful of what?
Rose-hips. It was all coming together in my head, the smart little witch that Grand-Mere had raised figuring things out and getting them together and presenting them to me just as I needed them. Trish had been cozy with the Jiggs - who knows how, but they’d given her access to magic that would take over people’s minds. Or maybe that came from the demon, who the Jiggs had taught her to contact. And she was using her remarkable garden as the medium. So much of magic was from growing, living things. All of mine was… and so was Trish’s.
That last piece of the puzzle, the thing I hadn’t figured out yet came to me. I had smelled something like a perfume
in Spengler’s room while he lay dead. A flowery scent, carried on the pizza that was delivered right into the room. That was how the demon got inside, and got to the man. Flowers were at the center of it all.
Roses caught Randall’s mind and turned it into mush. They’d enslaved Trish’s parents, and from a glance it looked like Lucy and Max were caught in some spell. Maybe she’d even slipped some to Hank, who was standing in the exact same position he’d been in, moving so little he might as well have been made of wax.
And the way the magic worked, it could only be subverted by using a changed part of it. The way a little sprinkle of cookie dough in a generic reversal potion saved those weird guys, a rose-hip, a different product of the same tree, could do the same trick.
Great. I had it all figured out. Now I just needed Trish to call a time out, so I could go back to my shop and make a brand new batch of the tea, steep the rose-hips in it for a few hours, then calmly apply it to everybody Trish had in her power.
What were the chances of that? Good, even?
While I was doing my thinking, Trish had been doing her bad guy gloating speech to a glowering Sibyl. I caught the end of it.
“And now you have to be so humiliated. Your also ran, your runner up, has done all the things you never could do. I don’t have to stick demons in the eye, they do what I say, follow my command. I’m not scared, like you. And what do you have to say about it? What? What?” she was practically shrieking.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Sibyl said, staring up at Trish. With complete mystification in her eyes. And I realized that I had never once heard Sibyl mention Trish. When I said the name there was never a quick conversation about the cute blonde girl a few years back in high school. She’d been training with the same people Sibyl had, trying out for the same job, but Sibyl never knew she existed.
“Wow,” I said, grimacing when Trish turned a face to me that was getting less pretty by the scowling, shrieking second. “What’s worse, that you’ve been twisted by this bizarre need for a pointless revenge, or that the person you think you’re getting the better of doesn’t even know your name? Couldn’t have picked you out of a line-up?”
“It’s a lie!” Trish shouted, throwing her hands up in a gesture of weird, futile ferocity. A wave of strength like a sudden wild wind whipped through the room, practically picking me up from the ground. It did move Lucy, who shrieked and rolled over towards me, her hair whipping around her like it had come to life.
Trish looked at her hand, and shook her head, chuckling. “You see? When you work with the demons, you get to do so many cool things. And that idiot Wilhelm… can you imagine the little plea he made? No, please, don’t do it. Give it up. It was never your job, you have no right,” she said, imitating the man with a sniveling, pathetic voice that grew angrier with every word.
“He came to me when he first came to town, to say he knew what I was doing. And asked, for the good of the cause, to stop. The cause that threw me over. That hated me, and when I wouldn’t…” she continued, then stopped, shivering with anger. She covered her face to say the next part.
“He said, ‘I’ll get the real slayer to stop you.’ Real slayer, but here I’ve got her tied up, and she can’t do anything. You married a boring little man, I’m getting into the richest family in town. You gave up your power, mine’s just growing.”
She flicked her hand, a quick little gesture moving side to side like she was wiping something off of a glass. And just like something had been removed from it, an invisible curtain being pulled to the side, three books were revealed on the table. At the top, and open, was Sibyl’s magic book. Beneath that, to my eternal shame, was Grand-Mere’s little book of notes on magic.
But underneath was something I hadn’t seen before. At first my heart skipped a beat when I thought it could be the Grimoire of Circe, which my little mouthy cat wanted to make the sole reason for my existence. But no, it wouldn’t look like that - like a commercial notebook that had been bought and decorated with some extra froo-froos sewn in… just like the cute little book that Grand-Mere had handed down to me.
Holy hand grenades and kitty cats, that could be… It had to be. I lay completely still, but my eyes were straining toward the pile of books as if they could jump out of my head and wander over to that pile, read over the books and find exactly what I needed to get myself out of this situation.
But that wouldn’t happen. Trish, cackling like she’d picked up the habit from some DVD on Ways to Be A Villain, picked up the Malleus magic book and began flipping through it.
“Oh, look at all of this. Who would have thought that the great enemies of magic would be such hypocrites? Stopping the scourge of evil magic was supposed to be the entire reason they existed, but look, they have their own book. Just like Wilhelm - it was okay for someone else to do it. It was okay for anybody but me. He’s dead, and you’re going to be, and I get to have the life I always wanted and it’s all thanks to a little demon friend.”
Don’t mention it, baby the demon said, a voice so filled with creepy intentions it made my skin want to crawl away with my eyes and get the heck out of its reach. This was pure torture, being stuck on the ground, being unable to do anything, being with my sisters but still, somehow, all on my own.
“Okay, let’s find something that will be fun. Ooh, there’s lots of stuff in here about hurting people. I guess when you’re an entire organization dedicated to fighting demons, the key is knowing ways to fight. Look, Mimi, at this little diagram. Didn’t they draw things so funny back then?”
She kneeled down toward me, and practically pushed the book in my face.
“Look at that,” she said, showing me the picture. It was funny, with that flat lack of perspective that one often saw in old drawings, where elbows and joints didn’t quite match up to how they worked on a real body. The figure in the image was punching straight through a wall made of brick, knocking one of the bricks straight out of it. “What if I did that to Sibyl?”
The drawing looked so strange. So angular and unrealistic. It couldn’t be old artists were dumb. They just hadn’t developed the techniques to make things look right. I was thinking this at the least appropriate of moments, and I had no idea why. Except I did not want to think about that happening to my sister. I didn’t want to think…
I looked at the picture on the next page. That was even weirder. The witch, or warlock, or slayer or whoever was depicted showing, I guessed, all the ways they could do magic without the traditional ingredients. I like to boil things or set them on fire to enact the spell. This showed someone’s magic born from a personal, physical sacrifice. Biting your own lip. Ouch. Breaking your own finger… gah! This was brutal, awful magic. Even if I knew how it worked, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Not even to save your own sister? Weak witch the demon cackled.
Connections were happening again. Magic may not be magic, but thinking sometimes is. Thoughts just grab each other and make a new idea, super quickly.
I needed time. I had some plan with the rose-hips and the thermos of tea that I did not think would work, but it was all I had. I needed those two things, plus some time!
No, you have no time the demon said. Die, die, everybody die. I see your mind, saw it when I whipped against you in the alley and could have eaten your soul then. The Warlock stopped me, but now he’s mine. If only you’d brought that pathetic little spy bird, then everyone who had escaped me—
“Hold that thought,” I said, grateful to a demon. Then I whipped my hands forward, yanked out a hair from my head, and, without being able to come up with any decent magic words just shouted the first thing that came to my head:
“Birdies, give me a hand!”
There was a pause in the room. Trish, who was leering at my sister and waving a hand in the air, stopped, and glanced down at me, her expression oddly befuddled. She looked back at both Randall and Hank, but they were too overloaded with the perfume of mind capture or whatever Trish’s mean-old spell was,
because they didn’t even have villainy smirks for her.
“Birdies what now?” she said. “Did you expect something to happen? I don’t understand. The Jiggs seem so worried about the Auclair girls. I’d expected to meet some resistance. To be challenged. But… ‘birdies give me a hand?’”
“I like birds,” I said, trying desperately to cover my deepening sense of complete doom. No hands, no wings, no beaks, nothing seemed to be lending me anything. I was alone.
Trish had begun making the motion from the book, crossing her arms and moving them while whispering something quiet and guttural under her breath. I could practically feel the power she was accruing, it was coming off her like waves of heat.
“Well, maybe I’ll get some demon crows to peck your eyes out then. Irony and…”
She stopped when a tapping sound came from the window.
A crow, visible only as a shadow of black against the night’s darker black, tapped its beak against the window.
“Demon crow. Right when I asked, tapping at my window lattice. Like the poem.”
“That’s a raven, dummy,” Lucy said, moving for the first time since she’d been sat down.
“Mmm, my mistake. And yours, because one bird is not…”
Tapping started again, this time a little louder, and more insistent.
Two crows looked into the window now, their shadowy heads cocking back and forth as they observed the odd humans sitting and laying and being about in their strange ways. Like we were just some curious thing they had to get a closer look at.
“Shoo,” Trish said, gesturing toward the window.
DONT the demon shouted.
The window wobbled, shimmered like it was a pool of water, and then completely shattered. All that power she’d saved up to hurt my sister and all she did was break a window.
And upset a pair of crows, who barely got out of the way in time and cawed the whole while.
“That was a waste, and I’ll make you pay,” Trish said, turning to begin the spell again. She lifted her arms up…
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 21
