Sebastian dropped Sabre's arm and the older witch nudged Sabre aside.
"I do apologize for my associate's reluctance to assist you," she said in a soft, breathy voice. Her greenish eyes regarded them with false kindness. "Please, join us in a more comfortable space."
She beckoned toward the curtain beyond them.
Kendra looked alarmed, but Sebastian nodded. They followed the three witches into the back room. The woman with braids returned to her seat.
They walked along a dark hallway. The silver-haired witch pushed open a doorway that led into a small alcove with a spiral staircase. They followed the witches up the stairs and through another door that opened into a cavernous space.
The room, or bar, was dimly lit with red string lights that hung like garlands from the bare beams of the ceiling overhead. A long polished bar, carved from the enormous trunk of a twisted oak tree, stretched along one wall. Behind the bar, dark bottles lined the glass shelves, lit from behind by a bluish glow. Couches and plush footstools surrounded knee-high glass tables. Several other people, all witches, Sebastian thought, occupied seats around the room. Some of them looked up when the silver-haired witch entered, but their gazes did not linger.
"Have a seat," she suggested, beckoning toward an empty table. "Sabre, some drinks?"
Sabre nodded and walked away without argument.
"My name is Ethel and this is Maze." She gestured to her companion. "And you are looking for the dark-haired witch from the north? The fire witch?"
"Yes, Dafne," Sebastian responded.
Ethel narrowed her eyes and regarded him slowly. His skin prickled as her stare traveled from his face and down over his body.
"Interesting," she concluded, but did not say more.
"You're the L'Obscurite then?" Victor asked, curiosity getting the best of him.
Ethel laughed, but Maze continued to watch them, unblinking. His face was a mask of neutrality. He made Sebastian nervous.
"We go by many names, dear child. Such young witches you are. Babies really."
Victor stiffened, but did not retort.
"Exactly," Kendra agreed. "And we need all of the help we can get. You must understand that? This is our friend and she has disappeared."
Ethel turned her eyes, now a milky blue, on Kendra. Sebastian realized that the woman's eyes were beginning to look like Kendra's.
"Your friend? The witch that I met had no friends. She had passion yes, purpose maybe, but no friends. You have some other reason for being here. Why don't you enlighten us and then perhaps I can help you."
Kendra noticed the witch's eyes and looked at Victor, startled.
Ethel shifted her gaze to Victor and her eyes began to darken, blue giving way to brown, now almost black.
Victor stared back at her.
"Neat little trick you have there," he sneered.
Ethel only smiled and continued to watch him with his own eyes.
"I didn't know Dafne," he admitted, with a shrug. "But she was part of a coven that I do know and they are my friends. I am here to help them."
"She was part of a coven? Has she been removed then?" Ethel asked.
"I couldn't tell you," Victor replied, looking impatient. "What does it matter to you anyway?"
Ethel folded her hands on the table and regarded him.
"How am I to know what does and does not matter if I only have pieces of the truth?"
Sabre returned with a tray of cocktail glasses, each filled to the rim with amber liquid.
"Apricot brandy. A specialty of mine," Ethel told them.
Sebastian looked at his glass. The liquid turned in a lazy circle around and around. He watched as the golden swirls moved hypnotically. The spinning grew faster, creating a cone in the center of the glass that seemed to extend beyond the glass, beyond the floor of the bar, somewhere... He brought the glass closer to his face.
Chapter 12
"The humans are too weak." Dafne heard the words through the veil of unconsciousness. She swam somewhere between waking and sleeping. Days passed in such a state and then she might get a few hours of complete awareness. As complete as oblivion would allow. She had no concept of night or day, of hour or month. Somewhere in the time before this moment, she had attempted to count the days. Whenever she found a lucid spell, she would scratch her fingernail into the dank wall of her prison. Then one day as she brushed her hand along the wall, searching for her markings, she found nothing. Scraped away? Had she been moved? No way to know.
But those words, "the humans are too weak," lingered in the fog of her mind. She clung to them and like a lifeline, she crawled up those words, hand over hand, until her eyes started to open. Her eyelids, as heavy and dry as sandbags, lifted until she could see the space before her through the tiniest of slits. Light. The first light she had seen in ages and shadows moving across the room.
Her eyes, too heavy to hold open, closed. She focused instead on sound.
"The other witch is dying, nearly dead I think. The witches are wasted on her trials." The same voice again, familiar. Dafne fell and fell into the vacuum of her memories. Endless sinking, but she kept a hand clasped around the rope of those words, the sound of that voice. Somewhere in the eternity of her life, she found its source. Dark and tall and beautiful and he had loved her, but then he'd hated her and she'd hated him more. Tobias.
The thought of his name sent a spasm of pain and grief through her body, and she jerked in her bed. It didn't feel like a bed though. It felt like a hard metal table. It felt like a morgue.
"Is she waking up?" Another voice now, and this one also familiar. Alva. Dafne found the name quickly this time. They went together after all. Tobias and Alva. Two parts of the same evil.
"They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky. They're all together ooky, The Vepar Family." The song, modified, ran through her head and she snorted laughter.
Again, she focused on her eyes and the lids lifted. She saw the shadows, the Vepars, closer now.
Tobias walked to her bedside and looked down into her face. His black eyes, rimmed with red where white should have been, roved along her body. He smiled and revealed his glistening white teeth, sharper than she remembered.
"Just a taste," he told her and lifted her wrist to his mouth. He punctured the skin and she saw that tiny red wounds dotted her entire hand and trickled down her wrist. He had been biting her. That was how he kept her unconscious. The venom in his teeth. She tried to jerk her hand away, but found no strength to pull and then no strength to keep her eyes open. They closed and she began to fall again.
****
"I'm going to take a walk," Abby told Lydie as she slipped out the door.
Oliver napped on the couch and Lydie sat at the dining room table reading a book. They still had not heard from the others, but decided that might be hopeful. Perhaps Kendra, Victor and Sebastian had managed to find out something after all.
She trailed her fingers along the wrought-iron fence and pushed out of the gate and onto the sidewalk. Romantic, sprawling mansions towered amongst the subtropical landscape. She marveled at their size, their beauty, but most of all their presence. Each house seemed an entity all its own. Some of them hulked and glowered while others seemed to smile as she passed.
She turned the corner and continued down another street and another until she came to an older neighborhood with houses in disrepair and abandon. She stopped at a massive structure. In the same style of the house they rented, with giant beams extending between the roof and ground, the house seemed to sink into the black soil around it. Looking at the house, Abby felt something akin to terror. It started at her hands, clasped on the iron rail, and crawled up her arms like tiny spiders. She took her hands away and shuddered, staring at the black windows, and almost expecting a figure in white to rush forward from the darkness.
"Haunted, that one." The voice startled her and Abby stumbled back, tripping on a split in the sidewalk and landing hard on her butt.
She stared up at a tall, slim man wearing a moth-eaten suit and a top hat. His gaunt face surrounded two bottomless black eyes that watched her with interest. He did not offer to help her up.
"It looks abandoned," Abby added, struggling back to her feet and wincing at her tender backside.
"Oh no," the man disagreed. "No one ever leaves that place."
They both stood and watched the house. The man turned to her suddenly and leaned close to her face.
"Have the sight, do ya?"
She recoiled at his hot, sour breath.
"I can see her, you know?" he accused. "The brown-skinned woman in fur."
"Kanti?" Abby asked, suddenly unnerved by the strange man.
He nodded and shifted his gaze over her shoulder.
"Spectral, dark witch," he spat, continuing to watch over her shoulder.
Abby turned, expecting to see Kanti's spirit hovering in the street, but only the desolate neighborhood returned her gaze.
"Can't outrun the dead ones," he whispered, shifting from foot to foot as if agitated. He dropped his voice even lower so that Abby had to lean close to hear him. "Leona French, she knows what to do."
He stood abruptly, turned and shuffled back down the sidewalk. Abby watched him until he turned the corner.
She gazed back at the house for another minute and then turned away, hoping that she would not run into the strange man a second time.
****
Sebastian blinked. In his hands he held a pile of roses in the early stages of soft decay. Their sweetness overpowered him and he shoved them away. They toppled off his lap into a heap on the concrete. He looked around. He sat on an iron bench in a deserted graveyard. Both Victor and Kendra sat on the grass, leaning against a large concrete tomb heavy with moss. In their laps lay mounds of spoiled roses.
He felt dizzy, and when he stood a wave of nausea forced him back to his seat.
Victor stirred and then yelped in surprise. Sebastian watched him fling the roses away, disgusted. His movement startled Kendra, also lost in a strange reverie. She turned slowly to look at them both.
"Where are we?" she asked and then in slow motion tilted her head to look at the flowers. She lifted one to her face and wrinkled her nose. "Ugh, they smell rotten."
"Does anyone know how we got here?" Sebastian asked. He tried to stand a second time, holding on to the bench for support.
Victor frowned as if searching his memory.
"We were in the bar. I didn't even take a drink..."
"Neither did I," Sebastian said, "but I looked at it."
"It was moving, the brandy, like a whirlpool," Kendra said.
"Yeah, I saw that too."
"Me too," Victor agreed. "But how? I mean how could that have led to this?" He motioned toward the cemetery.
Tall concrete tombs stood in rows along the sparse grass. They could not see an entrance or exit, only endless tombstones.
"Ethel Myers," Kendra read, pointing at the tomb that she and Victor had been leaning on.
"Same Ethel?" Victor asked, still disoriented. He heaved to standing. "1856 to 1906."
"Do witches fake their deaths?" Sebastian asked.
"Some do, sure. I mean once you live past a hundred people start to ask questions," Kendra responded, also studying the gravestone. "But usually they change their names."
"And move," Victor added with a hoarse laugh.
"Let's get out of here," Sebastian exclaimed. "This place is giving me the creeps."
"I second that," Victor agreed, helping Kendra to her feet.
They walked slowly, not unlike a funeral procession. It took several false starts before they found a path that led them out of the graveyard. Victor talked, all the while trying to determine how the L'Obscurite had hypnotized them.
"And why a cemetery and roses? Is it a warning?" he demanded, searching Kendra and Sebastian's blank faces.
"I'm curious too, I swear," Kendra told him, patting his arm. "But right now I want to get that cab over there and go get a glass of water. I feel like I've been eating dirt."
****
"Dafne went to the Lourdes during her pregnancy. She sought her help," Faustine told Elda.
Elda paused at the cauldron before her. Tendrils of steam drifted from the basin, and she closed her eyes and slipped momentarily into the sweet scent. A spell for Abby's child. She had confided the pregnancy to Helena and Faustine, but asked they keep it to themselves.
"Why would she do that?"
"Somehow she knew. She knew that the Lourdes had been the previous victim and went to her for guidance. The Lourdes told her to kill the child."
"No." Elda gasped.
"The Lourdes abandoned her own child, Elda. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but now it all makes sense. She left her baby to die in the woods, beneath the red willow, before it was red, before it was deadly."
Elda added a handful of hibiscus flowers and stepped away from the potion before her tears could fall and taint the mixture.
Elda wiped her cheeks and shook her head.
"Sometimes I want to escape from this, Faustine. The truth is so hard to bear. Have I grown weak? If we cannot sit with the horrors of the world, who can?"
Faustine took Elda in his arms and rested his chin on her head.
"It should hurt, my dear. It should feel unfathomable. That is where we find our strength to bring about change."
"So who saved her child then?"
"That I do not know, and perhaps it is not relevant, although I would be curious. It is clear that this spirit, Kanti, needs the continuation of the blood-line. Could she have influenced someone to save the child two hundred years ago? I have preferred to believe she's only recently come into her power, but this information confounds me."
Elda sighed and waved her hand above the potion, which vanished. Her grief had ruined it. She had watched the oils move from intricate spirals to thick clumps. She would have to make it another time, when happiness felt more accessible.
****
"I just don't want you to go," Sebastian insisted for the second time.
Abby and Sebastian sat on a wooden porch swing in the backyard. White twinkle lights hung from the cypress trees, weaving through boughs of moss. Abby could see bits of stars through the opening in the trees, but the moon was covered by low drifting clouds.
"I know you're looking out for me," Abby said. "And I appreciate it. You know that I do, but I'm in this. Maybe I'm the only one who can speak to this witch Ethel. Have you thought of that? This world is mysterious. Some of these witches wait for a sign or an energy or an aura. Maybe I'm the one who has it."
Sebastian slid off the swing and got down on his knees, taking Abby's hands and looking into her face.
"They were playing with us, Abby. They had no intention of giving us any information. They didn't care who we were or why. I'm telling you that they're dangerous. I haven't felt right since we woke up from our trance, or whatever they did to us. I'm not sure they didn't plant something in our heads."
"Kendra and Oliver performed every revealing spell they could think of and nothing showed up."
"I don't care if Elda and Faustine had performed every spell they know. These are not ordinary witches. They're dealing with a different kind of magic and they don't play by the rules." He squeezed her hands, exasperated, and she saw the fear in his eyes, for her.
As she gazed at him, she suddenly understood the concern etched in the lines of his face. His parents and Claire, his entire family, had been ripped away from him far too soon. His grief still lived in his every cell, every thought, word and deed.
Abby pulled his hands to her face and kissed them. She tugged him back up and then nestled into him when he sat on the bench.
"I love you and, even though I want to have my way, I'm going to choose the path of least resistance right now. I will not go to the L'Obscurite. However"-she held up a hand when he started to kiss her-"If no one gets any information before it is time to leave,
then I am going to try. We are not going home without finding out exactly what they told Dafne."
Sebastian cocked his head and nodded.
"I can live with that. If it does happen, then we'll all go together, and we'll lure them into the light of day where they can't play us like puppets."
From the house, Abby heard the scratchy croon of Etta Jones.
"There were birds in the sky, but I never saw them winging, no I never saw them at all, till there was you," Abby sang along, one hand on her belly and the other tight in Sebastian's own warmer, larger hand.
Sebastian's stomach growled and he sighed.
"You're hungry," she said.
"No, not yet. I want to remember this moment. Keep singing." He kissed her temple.
She continued to sing, not knowing all the words and making them up as she went along.
****
Galla stepped through the mirror into the library at Ula. Her short white hair hung limp around her gaunt face. Julian held out his arm and she placed her weight heavily against him. She settled into a chair and looked at the witches of Ula. Faustine, Elda, Bridget and Helena sat around the room.
"Indra is dead," she told them. She lifted a delicate silver locket as if it offered proof. "I've been handling it every day. Before the All Hallow's Ball, I never saw her take it off, so I knew it was my best chance for an impression of her. When I picked it up this morning, a horrible grief overtook me. She is dead."
"Oh," Helena moaned and put her hand to her mouth.
"I'm so sorry," Elda murmured, going to Galla and sitting close to her. She wrapped her in a hug and Galla laid her head on Elda's shoulder.
Faustine walked to the window and stared out at the lake.
"Dafne? Did you hold Dafne's ring?" Faustine asked, his back to the group.
Galla nodded. "I did, and nothing has changed. No images, but no..."
"Darkness," Bridget finished.
Kanti Page 12
