by Pat Esden
“Isn’t that Zachary’s kitten?” Selena asked when the three of us reached them.
Olya gave the cat a second look. “My goodness, you’re right.”
“Don’t worry about the beast,” Kate said. “Nothing’s going to happen to him.” She set down the lamp and the excess oil snaked across the floor of the cage, out through the cage’s mesh, and back into the lamp. The way the oil returned to its container was one of the cool things about it, not to mention that the oil was self-renewing.
Chase crouched and peered into the cage. “You’re assuming the oil will react the same on a cat as it would on a human?”
Kate nodded. “In fact, we ran extensive tests to make sure it would.”
Normally, human bodies transformed from solid to ethereal when they went through the veil and entered the djinn realm. But coating a person in the Methuselah oil made their body ethereal in the mortal world and solid in the djinn realm. It had the exact opposite effect on genies. However, the oil had two problems. First, it only lasted from sunset to sunrise; and second, its strong cabbage-and-wet-sheep scent.
“So,” Kate said to Chase, “do you smell anything or do you think we’ve successfully de-scented it?”
He leaned closer to the cage and took a whiff. “Nothing. Not even normal cat smell.”
Selena and I also sniffed. Chase was right. There wasn’t a trace of anything.
“Great.” Kate wriggled off her rubber gloves. “That’s one step done.” Her gaze landed on me. “Did you find out anything?”
“We—” I started.
But Selena cut me off. “You should wash the cat off before the oil turns him invisible. After all, he’s a pet not a lab rat.”
“Unfortunately”—Kate strummed the cage’s mesh with her fingers—“once it’s applied, nothing can wash the oil off. From sunset until sunrise, this beast will be invisible—and incarcerated for the duration as well. If he’s a good kitty, I may give him a can of tuna in the morning.”
The cat sprung from his corner, claws zinging against the mesh beneath her fingers.
Clutching her hand, Kate jumped back. “Looks like somebody may get his manhood snipped instead of tuna.”
“You were asking about Bar Harbor,” I said, loud enough to steer the conversation back where it belonged. “We found someone who can do the magic or at least we think she can.”
Olya gawked at us. “Flute-magic? Are you sure?”
Kate stopped clutching her hand and rested it on her hip. “I’m assuming that there is a downside to this story. What did you say this man or woman’s name was?”
“Lotli,” Chase said. “She’s around Annie’s age.”
I glanced at him. He certainly had that information on the tip of his tongue. I turned to Kate. “There was a Native—”
“They,” Selena interrupted, “I mean, we saw smoke following her music. But we lost her. Then we found out who she was.”
I shot a look in her direction. Why hadn’t she let me just tell the story? She wasn’t there. She’d screw it all up.
Kate frowned. “What exactly do you mean by ‘lost’?”
“She took off before we could talk to her,” Chase said.
Tossing her gloves on top of the cage, Kate huffed. “I figured something like this would happen.”
“I’m sure we can find her,” I said. I pulled the booklet from my bag, opened it to the page with the fire and the flutist, and shoved it into her hands. “This journal’s on display at the museum right now. It looks interesting.”
Kate studied the page for a second, then passed the journal to Olya. “Well, that is something. Once the men get back, perhaps they can get a look at the original and round up this Lotli girl.”
“Why wait?” I said. “Maybe the three of us can’t deal with getting access to the journal, but we could try to find Lotli.”
Kate flicked her fingers, indicating her bandage-wrapped neck and arm. “That might be an acceptable idea, if I could go with you. As it is, I can’t risk getting involved in something that could rapidly turn sour. You have no idea if she’s harmless or not. There are some very ugly and dark things out there.”
Out there and standing right in front of her, the voice of guilt and shame whispered inside me. And a dull ache knotted in my chest as the sensation of Grandmother’s hands cupping my face came back to me. Liar. Liar, the voice inside me chanted. It’s all your fault, everything that happened.
Shoving that voice aside, I planted my feet and raised my chin to match Kate’s. “We can do this,” I said. Knowing Kate, she’d object and object hard. But I had to be a part of this. I had to help set right what I’d put in motion. “Besides, how powerful can Lotli be? She lives in a camper with her sickly grandfather.”
Kate shook her head. “No. This is something that requires an experienced touch, and at least a modicum of tact.”
The urge to fire back something nasty hovered on my tongue, but I swallowed it and firmly said, “Like she’s going to be less defensive around a bunch of old men than girls her own age?”
Selena stepped forward. “She could be gone before the men get back. Not sending us is ridiculous. I saw her. She didn’t look wicked or evil. She looked like a lost soul.”
Olya set the booklet down next to the cage. “Selena, sweetheart, Kate has a point. Better safe than sorry.” She glanced at Chase. “Don’t you agree?”
“I could go by myself,” he suggested.
I swiveled toward him. “We’re sticking together.”
“I’m assuming you didn’t get her phone number?” Kate steepled her fingers and smiled, like a chess player who’s made the winning move.
“No,” Chase admitted, “just her first name. No location or anything else.”
“Then how do you propose to find her, other than by questioning half the people in the state of Maine?”
“We could scry,” Selena said. She bit her bottom lip as if regretting the suggestion. “At least we could, if we had something personal of hers. But we don’t.”
Olya’s eyes brightened. “That would be true if I did the scrying. But, Selena, you could scry by using your memory of her music. That would work.”
“Except”—Selena peeked up sheepishly—“I . . . ah—I was kind of in the bathroom while she was performing. I saw her and heard like a couple of notes, but not enough for that.”
Kate raised her hands in surrender, then let them drop to her sides. “That rules out scrying. So I guess we’ll be waiting for now.”
“Um”—Chase pulled out his wallet—“I have something of hers.” He opened it and took out a small green feather. “It came off her flute. She—gave it to me.”
I stepped back, unable to believe I’d heard right. What the hell? Why hadn’t he mentioned this on the way home?
Olya snatched the feather. “Are you certain it is not ensorcelled?”
My face went hot, anger flooding through me. “That was a brilliant move,” I snapped at him.
Chase’s voice hardened. “It isn’t anything special. She gave them to a bunch of people, even to the kid sitting next to me.”
A headache thumped behind my eyes. I pressed my fingers against the bridge of my nose, trying to ward it off. “Yeah, fine. But you really should have said something. Considering how important she could be”—I looked him full in the face—“to us—as in all of us.”
His eyes went flinty. He folded his arms across his chest.
“It is probably an innocent gift,” Olya said. She pressed the feather between her fingertips and closed her eyes, breathing in and out slowly, her lips moving in a silent prayer. “The girl’s presence is on it and also the presence of a hummingbird. No magic, light or dark. I see blue water. Red flowers.” She opened her eyes. “There’s no danger here.”
Chase’s gaze slid toward me.
I shrugged, and mouthed, Sorry. I was, too. In fact, now that I’d gotten the anger out of my system, my guilt was stronger than ever. I really shouldn’t have b
itched at him in front of everyone. But I couldn’t have stopped myself. He really shouldn’t have taken it from her.
Hugging myself, I watched silently as Olya passed the feather to Kate. She did the same focusing thing and came to the same conclusion. She in turn gave it to Selena to test. And an odd-man-out feeling settled over me. All this witchcraft and otherworldly stuff came as second nature to them, even to Chase. But everything about it was painfully unfamiliar and disconcerting to me. Just like the emotions Lotli had sparked.
* * *
After supper, I went out to the terrace with Selena and Olya to watch them scry with the feather. Chase had wanted to come. But Olya told him it could take hours and he’d promised to help Zachary with his kickboxing moves before he took over Tibbs’s patrol shift.
Olya set three candles in the middle of the glass-topped table where Selena and I sometimes ate breakfast. She motioned for Selena to come closer, then the two of them chanted and stared at the flames, meditating to get into the zone. I watched, and thought about the Santeria priest in New Orleans that Dad and I had sold a Victorian funeral portrait to and about the tour guide witch we’d met in Salem. I’d never dreamed that I’d be directly involved with this kind of thing. Still, despite how little I knew and how in the research room I’d felt like the odd man out, sitting here now felt right, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Maybe it was the night air. Or how open and relaxed Selena and Olya were about everything. Maybe the universe had shifted or, perhaps, my emotions had simply settled back to normal.
Finally, Olya took out a black crystal egg and gazed into it while holding the feather, hoping to see Lotli’s whereabouts. When that failed to work, she poured water into a silver bowl with a black interior, sliced her finger with a bone-handled knife, and let a drop of blood fall into the water. The blood flared outward, iridescent in the candlelight. With great care, she floated the feather on top of the water in the very center of the bowl.
All around us, the evening shadows deepened as twilight faded. Solid darkness closed in. No owls hooted. No crickets chimed. Only the muted rush of the ocean waves sounded in the distance.
Olya cradled her hands around the bowl, her eyes rolling back in their sockets as she and Selena murmured an incantation. The sound raised the hair on my arms and a light-headed sensation came over me. I smelled something cold and shivered, wondering if the chill came from a ghost or spirit guide.
The blood on the water shimmered bright red and the feather moved, the quill’s tip remaining motionless as if it were pinned to the center of the bowl, while the rest of the feather spun, slowing clockwise until it pointed northward—toward Bar Harbor.
I sucked in a breath, my brain telling me I couldn’t have seen right. But I had. The feather had moved on its own accord.
Selena rested her hand on her mother’s arm, bringing her back from the trance. “It worked perfect, just like a compass,” she said.
Olya blinked and shook her head as if trying to straighten out her thoughts. “Phew. That wasn’t easy. There’s not much of a connection. I’ll have to go with you tomorrow or you’ll never find her.”
Selena waved her off. “Don’t be silly. I’ve been practicing and I’ve been thinking, too.” She grinned. “Maybe we need to shake things up—give scrying a makeover. After all, Lotli is young.”
Olya’s eyes bulged and her hand flew to her chest. “No. That is not a good idea. The Craft, she is about patterns and connections. Old ways work best.”
With a flick of her hair, Selena plucked the feather from the bowl. “And who just messed with a magic oil that had remained unchanged since Methuselah’s day?” Before her mother could reply, Selena pivoted toward me. “Would you mind assisting me in an experiment?”
“Sure.” I had no idea what she was up to, but her point about the oil was right and I was as determined to prove she could do this as she was. Actually I was crossing my fingers that Selena would prove she could do it better than her mom—not only for Selena’s sake, but to increase our chance of finding Lotli as well.
“Could you get me a bottle of cola from the kitchen? Any kind should work.”
I dashed inside and got a soda from the fridge. Through the open window I could hear Olya lecturing Selena about the importance of witchcraft traditions and Selena obstinately not budging. Selena had caved to her parents’ demand that she take a year off before she went away to Yale for Premed. But over the last few weeks, Selena had made the cost of that surrender perfectly clear to them. She was going to have her way in every other area of her life: total Internet freedom, no credit card limits, no clothing restrictions, and especially her freedom to tinker with medicine and magic as she saw fit. The only place she’d failed to get her way was in their unwavering resistance to her dating and social life.
Once the two of them quit bickering, I hurried back out to the terrace and set the soda on the table in front of Selena.
“Watch and learn,” she said to her mother.
Olya frowned. “Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work, sweetheart.”
“Don’t worry about that. I may not have heard much of Lotli’s music, but I did see her.” She pulled a vintage compact from her jeans pocket. “Perfect for scrying on the run, huh?”
She set the compact on the table, opened it, and poured cola on its mirror, turning it into as dark of a reflective surface as the silver bowl her mother had used. Then she pricked her finger with the knife, added the blood, and carefully floated the feather on top.
Selena’s chest rose and fell in a slow rhythm. Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. She began to murmur. I shuddered when her head lolled back and her eyeballs rolled up until all I could see were the whites. It was gross, even grosser than when Olya had done it. The creeps rapidly faded though, as the feather zinged northward toward Bar Harbor in half the time it took for her mom to get the same reaction.
I glanced at Olya. Her eyes glistened with pride. I was certain Selena’s desire to go away to Yale and her frustration at being delayed was real, but for the first time I wondered if maybe her parents were right to suggest she hold off. Selena’s gift for magic was clearly extraordinary.
CHAPTER 5
Open minds with eyes on the heavens.
—Home page
www.SerpentWrestler.com
The next morning, I was jolted awake at four a.m. by a sudden realization. With everything that had been going on, I’d missed the registration deadline for the fall semester at Sotheby’s. I could sneak into an online class, but I’d really wanted to take the short course in London.
As I switched on the bedside light, my brain finished waking up and I realized I was mistaken. The deadline was next week.
With a sigh, I got out of bed, retrieved my phone from my bag, and double-checked Sotheby’s e-mail. Yup, one more week, and I knew exactly which course to register for. There were a ton of more important things going on right now, but that didn’t mean I could just blow this off. After all, I’d been dying to do it for ages.
I slumped down in the desk chair with the phone in my hand, thinking about classes and how I’d felt last night watching Selena and Olya scry, like I was exactly where I was meant to be. Before Dad and I had returned to Moonhill, I’d never thought about doing anything other than deal antiques, travel, and buy and sell stuff. Sure, I wanted to take classes and become a certified appraiser—as a way to do what Dad had done but on a higher level. It’s what I’d always planned for my future, along with spending some time in London on my own.
Except now there were these unexpected forks in the road: Selena, my grandfather, all these family members, magic and secrets, a whole world I thought only existed in stories. And the possibility of Mother coming home, so many things had already begun to change because of that. And there was Chase. There was no way to tell if what he and I had would last. But my gut and heart—and a few other parts a bit lower down in my body—screamed that they didn’t want to be away from him, in fact they ye
arned to be with him every second.
Chase. I let my hand touch my lips, drift down my throat, dreaming about how my whole body trembled with desire when our eyes met and lingered. Just the two of us, alone. How yesterday, after we’d left his mother’s house, my heart had ached and I’d longed to put my arms around him, to comfort him. It must have been horrible for him to hear that his mom was in a permanent care facility. What had the maid called it?
I picked my phone up from my lap and did a quick search. Maine. Care Facilities. Beach Rose House. In a moment, my suspicion was confirmed. It was in Bar Harbor, not far from the village green, in fact.
Most likely, Chase had done the same Internet search since we’d gotten home. He was probably out there patrolling the grounds alone, thinking about his mom and if he wanted to take the next step and contact her. Or he was thinking about how he might never see her, if something went wrong when he attempted to rescue my mother.
I glanced at the time. Four thirty. His shift ended at five.
I sent him a text: Hey. How’s it going? Quiet night?
He answered instantly: Real quiet. About to wake Tibbs so he can take over.
A spike of excitement raced into my veins and I smiled. I knew what would cheer Chase up. Maybe I’d pay for it later, but who needed sleep anyway? Meet me on the widow’s walk. ASAP.
Why?
Bring some ice.
I shut off my phone and threw it into my oversize shoulder bag before he could ask me anything else.
Leaving my sleep shirt on, I brushed my hair and put on a tiny bit of makeup. Then I snagged a couple single-serve orange juices and the bottle of strawberry vodka that I’d had Tibbs pick up for me, and stashed them in my bag along with a couple of Solo cups. It was a bitch being twenty and having to find people to buy liquor for me, not to mention having to stash mixers in my underwear drawer like some kid in high school, not that I drank that much—but it was nice to have something for occasions like this.
I grabbed the quilt off my bed and tiptoed into the dark hall with my flashlight in hand.
