EYE OF THE WITCH (Detective Marcella Witch's Series)

by Dana Donovan

  “His real relationship?”

  “Ricardo Rivera was Benny’s father. It’s complicated, but—”

  “Never mind. I get it.”

  “Anyway, things got out of hand, Rivera shot Piakowski and then….” I stopped there, finding it harder to say the words than to let her finish saying them for me.

  “And then your boy, Spinelli, tied up the score. How tidy.”

  “It was self-defense. He had to shoot him.”

  Lilith pinched the flame back onto the candle’s wick. “Oh, I’m sure the DA will clear him.”

  “Why shouldn’t he? It was justified.”

  “He reminds you of yourself, doesn’t he, Detective?”

  “Spinelli? No. If anything he reminds me of a younger Carlos.”

  She looked up over the candle. “I told you to watch that one, didn’t I? He’s impetuous. That scene he caused at the restaurant is typical of his over-zealousness. ”

  “He’ll do fine,” I said, feeling a little agitated now. But then Lilith always had a way of pushing my buttons like that. I leaned back in my seat and straightened my shoulders. “Look, Lilith, I didn’t come here to—”

  “Wait,” she said, holding her finger in the air. She tilted her head to one side in anticipation of it, and before I could ask why, the old grandfather clock by the door struck midnight. As the chimes rang, she stood and offered me her hand.

  “What?” I said, admittedly confused.

  She broke up in a giddy sort of laugh. “Come on, Anthony. It’s why you came here tonight, isn’t it?”

  It was, I thought, or I guessed. I had come for a reason. I just didn’t know exactly what. I took her hand and followed her to the living room. She pointed to a spot on the floor by the sofa, and I understood that to mean I should stand there and just watch for a while. She crossed the room, stopping at a bookcase where she removed a large book from the top shelf. It looked to me like an old bible, but of course, with Lilith I knew that wasn’t the case. Still, she handled it with all the reverence befitting a sacred scripture, dusting the cover with the brush of her hand before gently blowing over the top. She cradled it across the room, setting it on a podium of sorts, before opening it carefully to a section previously book-marked with a black ribbon. The podium stood only inches from me, so close that I might have read from the text, had it not been written in script unknown to mortal men. I looked up from the book and found Lilith looking at me. Her eyes appeared cat-like, big and round with pupils shaped like long thin diamonds.

  “This is the grimoire,” she told me, “a book of witchcraft used for invoking spirits. It’s a text of ages, written by my ancestors and passed down through generations. Some people call it the book of shadows, but that’s a misnomer, as is the case with most things associated with witchcraft. The perversion of this religion exists only within those who don’t understand it. Tonight you will come to understand it for yourself.”

  Her words struck me like a blow to the chest. I felt my heart flatten and the wind in my lungs compress to a shriveled wedge of air. I swallow back the lump in my throat and smiled at her thinly, knowing thirty years earlier I would have run from that place as fast as I could. She looked down at the book and ran her index finger over a single line, mouthing the passage to herself as she had, no doubt, recited a dozen times before. I felt uneasy watching her, yet I also felt filled with anticipation, the likes I hadn’t known in years. After reading the passage several times, she closed the grimoire and then glided on a thread of air back to the bookcase. This time she retrieved a brown canvas pouch and returned it to the center of the room. Untying its drawstrings, she began spilling the contents of the pouch onto the floor. I thought it looked like sand at first, for it poured out fine and dry, though it sparkled like glitter and smelled like mulberry. She poured the substance in a circle, maybe the size of a large round table top, her body positioned directly in the middle.

  “Are you wearing any metals?” she asked, but before I could answer, she added, “If so, remove all of it now.”

  At once, I emptied my pockets of all my loose change, my keys and my cell phone. I removed my rings and a gold chain from around my neck, and even my belt. “Done,” I said, suddenly feeling a little naked and just a bit foolish.

  She pointed at my shoes. “Those, too.”

  “My shoes?”

  “They’ve got heels, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they glued or nailed?”

  I kicked them off without further discussion. She continued pouring out sand within the circle, this time drawing two points connected by opposing arced lines that formed what looked like a cat’s eye. That done, she stood erect, the fringes of her robe barely brushing the highest peaks of the sand piles. I noticed then how the candles she placed around the room, if connected by lines, would also resembled that cat’s eye pattern. She smiled at me upon that discovery.

  “Earlier tonight,” she said, “I gave you a charm and told you it was the eye of the witch. I thought you might find strength in its symbolism. I was wrong.” She splayed her arms to encompass the design she had drawn on the floor with the sand. “This, Detective, is the real eye of the witch. Focus with me, your thoughts and energy, as I summons the four guardians of nature into the circle.”

  What happened next still astonishes me as I think about it. Lilith closed her eyes, tilted her head back and echoed the words from the grimoire that she practiced earlier. Nearly at once, four tiny white lights appeared like fireflies, buzzing about the room in spirited play, darting and zigzagging until finally descending to the floor by Lilith’s feet. They gamboled there in rhythmic tempos within the circle, tripping from point-to-point along the arced lines and around the outer edges in no particular order. More words spilled from her lips, and a bluish white light formed only inches above her head. It hovered there nervously, filled with static heat like an electric halo. She drew a line with her hand down the center of her body from the bridge of her nose all the way to the floor. As she did this, a light from that halo followed the path of her hand, entering the circle of sand and lighting it up in a glow of white-hot energy. Next, she motioned with her right hand to her left shoulder, and then with her left hand to her right shoulder. That gesture directed the path of energy along the arced lines to the end points of the sculpture, thus completing the Eye of the Witch.

  “A year and a day ago,” said Lilith, grasping the witch’s ladder around her neck. “I cast a spell upon these beads and committed my involvement to a cause unbefitting my convictions. In the vein of returning energy, I submit and relinquish this object to the coven of twelve, my ancestral guardians and keepers of the Witch’s Lineage.”

  With those words, the ring of energy surrounding her body exploded in a flash as bright as day. I started to back away, but as my eyes readjusted to the relative dim of candlelight, I saw Lilith motioning for me to step into the circle with her. I don’t think I felt a moment’s hesitation after that. I only remember wanting to join her, and wanting to do it quickly before she changed her mind, or the power of the eye subsided. I moved to the edge of the circle and reached for her. Our hands joined, and I immediately felt a sense of comfort like slipping into a warm pool on a chilly morning. She pulled me fully into the circle, removed the beaded witch’s ladder from around her neck and draped it over my head. I think, at that point, I started to say something, but she held her finger and thumb to my mouth and pinched my lips closed. Then she squeezed both my hands and recited this:

  “Banish weaker mortal souls, we summons thee of witch’s role. Through hexing slight of wizard’s slant, invoke thy magick, and essence grant. By Rite of Passage this night begun, bestow upon thy soul plus one.”

  I’m not sure what I expected next. But I was surprised when nothing at all happened right away. I looked into Lilith’s eyes. The normal human-like features returned. Gone were the cat’s eyes with thin diamond-shaped pupils. Though with Lilith, they still presented a haunting ebony g
aze that one dares not stare into too long. I watched them narrow with her growing smile, which tipped me off that all wasn’t done. A tickle in my stomach filled me with the sensation one gets when poised at the top of a roller coaster that’s about to plunge over the first hill. I smiled back at her in anticipation of something greater to come.

  That’s when she leaned in close and blew a puff of air into my face. I felt her grip against my hands tighten and then all hell broke loose. The ring of sand at our feet ignited in a vertical shower of rushing wind, light and sound, a noise so loud I could not hear myself think. The ground shook. The walls of the house rocked and the ceiling opened up completely, exposing us to the moon and stars and a cascading column of energy unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before. I let out a holler full of rapture and bliss, consumed by the power unleashed barely within my touch. Furniture filled my peripheral view in colorful blurs flying skyward and beyond. I imagined myself standing in the plume of a fiery rocket, a sublime display of the supernatural invading the world of mediocrity. It astounded and frightened me, knowing that if I stepped outside the circle even a bit that the blast from that plume would propel me into orbit like a tiny speck of dust. In a moment of euphoria and awakening, I pulled Lilith in closer and I held her tightly. I meant no implications about it, but that the kinship I felt went beyond the temporal sense to a boundless sphere. And in the middle of absolute commotion, with chaos churning all around us, I found a sense of love and belonging when she wrapped her arms around me and locked her fingers behind my back.

  “Lilith!” I said, my voice hoarse from shouting above the noise of the rushing wind. “If anything happens to us, I want you to know—”

  “Can it!” she hollered back. “Something is happening to us! So, shut up and let it happen!”

  She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek to my chest. Now, I don’t want to say that she was snuggling, but I did feel her arms around my waist tighten some. I covered the other side of her face with my hand to protect her from possible flying debris, but I think she knew that was only an excuse for me to hug her, rather than hold her. I closed my eyes and set my chin atop her head.

  Sometime later, I can’t say when, but I felt a hand upon my shoulder. I got the strangest feeling that I had somehow drifted off to sleep. The night fell silent. A distant hiss from a broken gas line filled the air with the smell of sulfur. Lilith was still in my arms, both her hands still locked around my waist. I pulled back to look at her, almost believing that she had fallen asleep, too. I brushed her cheek, and like a budding flower she peeled back and gazed up into my eyes.

  “Hey,” I said. “You all right?”

  She smiled softly, her chin riding with the rise of my chest as I breathed. “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  The hand on my shoulder shook me and a voice accompanying it said, “Are you two all right? That must have been some weird tornado.”

  I looked around. The house was gone, the walls and furnishings, all of it—gone. Lilith unclasped her hands and took a single step back. She laid her palm against my chest and smiled oddly, the way girls do sometimes when you’re working that tickle spot under their arm.

  “What?” I said. “Why are you smiling?”

  She ran the back of her hand up and down my cheek. “You look good.”

  I rolled my eyes up and back again. “So do you.” What else could I say? Compliments from Lilith don’t come every day.

  “Look,” said the man behind me, and only then did I realize he was a police officer. “You kids look like you’re doing fine. Just so you know, the ambulance and fire trucks are on their way.

  I turned to say something to him, but he had already started away. “What’s with him?” I said, hiking my thumb up over my shoulder. “He’s not so old he should get away with calling me kid.”

  That’s when I saw it. I looked deeper into her eyes. Something remarkable happened. I couldn’t say for sure, but if I had to guess, I would have said that she looked seven or eight years younger, a noticeable difference for a twenty-something year-old. I cupped her face in my hands and steadied it to the moonlight spilling over my shoulder. “Lilith. What was that spell you cast? You look younger!”

  She pulled back some, so I let her go. “Detective, do you know how old I am?” Her smile seemed prettier than I had ever noticed before.

  “I don’t know. I suppose you’re about twenty-five, six…something like that?”

  “No. I’m much older.”

  “Thirty? You can’t be older than thirty, because you look like you’re seventeen.”

  “I’m over one hundred.”

  “What? Months?”

  “Years, Detective! Over one hundred years! In fact, I’m a hundred and seventy-two.”

  “What? That’s impossible!”

  She planted her hands on her hips the way I had seen her do, say—oh, maybe a hundred and seventy-two times before. “Come here,” she said, leading me by the hand to the part of the slab that used to be her bathroom. She picked up a piece of broken mirror and handed it to me. “Careful. It’s sharp.” I took the mirror and held it to her face. “No!” she scolded, slapping my hand away. “It’s not for me. It’s for you. Look.”

  If I live another hundred and seventy-two years, which I might, I’ll never get over the initial shock of seeing my face in that broken piece of glass. In my wildest dreams (and trust me, I’m still not sure I’m not dreaming) I never could have imagined it. As I held the mirror to my face, the person I saw staring back was a version of me that I hadn’t seen in over forty years.

  “My, God!” I cried. “How is this possible? How….” I patted myself down from head to toe. I looked at the palms of my hands and then at the backs of them. I peeled my socks off and looked at my feet. I pulled my shirt up and marveled at my washboard stomach. Every part of me looked young, smooth and tight. I turned to Lilith, unable to speak. She reached up and closed my opened mouth.

  “You’re not upset, are you?”

  “Upset? No! Of course not.”

  “Oh, it’s just that some old fogies can’t wait to die. I didn’t think you were one of them.”

  “Are you saying I’ll never die?”

  She laughed robustly, even snorted. “No, you’ll die…someday, just not as soon as you thought. Unless I kill you, that is.”

  I knew she was kidding, but still, I let the comment go unchallenged, considering her questionable past with the Lieberman workshop. “So, what now?” I asked. “Where do I go from here?”

  She stepped toward me. “Where do you want to go?”

  I put my arms around her and pulled her in closer. “I want to go where ever you go. If that’s all right.”

  I leaned in to kiss her. “Wait,” she said, and pulled away. “This is not why I did this. I included you in my rite of passage because I thought you had lost yourself. I wanted to help.”

  “And you have. I truly was lost. If not for you, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “But it’s different now. You know that.”

  “Yes. I see. We’re nearly the same age now.”

  “Hardly,” she said, in her typical sarcastic breath. “I’m still thrice your age.”

  “Funny, you don’t look a day over twenty.”

  The lights and sirens coming around the corner let us know that the ambulance and fire trucks were almost there. Lilith took me by the hand and led me off to the side of the yard where we melted into the crowd of onlookers that had spilled out of neighboring homes. Behind the fire trucks and ambulance came more police cars, one of which carried Carlos and Spinelli to the scene. We faded back further behind the crowd, taking a seat on a rock wall partitioning her yard from the neighbor’s, and disappearing into the shadows.

  “I’ll have to tell them,” I said. “They’ll think we died in the tornado if I don’t.”

  She shook her head. “Tell them what you will about yourself, but leave me out of it.”

  “But, why?”<
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  “Because, don’t you see? Every once in a while I have to make it look like I died. How else can I explain my age?”

  “You mean you’ve done this before?”

  She raised her right shoulder to her ear and dropped it. “Eh, a few times.”

  “How many?”

  “Well, you have to figure that witches only age about a year to every three that mortals age. After ten or fifteen years, people start asking questions. You can’t just go around telling them you look so damn great because you eat right and exercise. Why do you think we used to get burned at the stake so often? People back in those days looked like shit at thirty. At least now it’s getting so that a careful witch can wait a decade or two before she renews her rite of passage.”

  “So, you have to renew it from time-to-time?”

  “I don’t have to,” she scoffed. “Not if I want to become an old hag like my grandmother.”

  “Is she a witch, too?”

  “Detective, all the women in my family have been witches. We came over on the Mayflower.”

  “Huh.” I looked out over the crowd of people that ventured closer to the spot where Lilith’s house once stood. The police did little to keep them away, seeing there wasn’t much more than a slab left for them to look at. I turned to Lilith, who seemed the least bit concerned about losing her house, and I asked her, “How does that work again? The ceremony, I mean. I look forty years younger, while you, forgive me for saying, have changed little, relatively speaking.”

  She laughed, which made me feel silly for asking. But it really didn’t make sense to me. “It’s your prime,” she said, and I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about. “The rite of passage restores the body to its biological prime. For women, that’s usually about age twenty, for men, about twenty-five, regardless of where you start from. I last renewed my rite of passage eighteen years ago. That reset my clock back to what you see now. If you knew me then you would have expected to see me as a thirty-eight-year-old last night. And you saw me. I mean, let’s face it. Did I look pretty damn good for thirty-eight, or what?”