~
“I’m back,” said Étoile brightly when I opened the door after flicking on the porch light. By now it was early evening and the sun had just about set in the sky so I had all the lights turned on and had set the fire crackling in the grate again, filling the room with warmth. I’d spent my day reading a mystery and playing CDs through my laptop. All in all, it had been a quite reassuringly – boringly, even – pleasant day thanks to my burst of good feeling. “And I brought reinforcements,” Étoile added as two women stepped out from behind her. Neither of them smiled.
“Reinforcements for what?”
“For trapping that evil inside of sweet little Chyler.” Étoile said it, like it was not only a completely natural thing to say, but also that it was completely absurd that I had to ask.
“You’re going to do that? Where’s Seren and David?”
“They’re getting supplies. And Evan is still watching over Chyler. As soon as we’re ready, he’ll bring her here.”
“Why here?” I hissed. It wasn’t like it had gone well the last time.
“Where else? It’s better that we do the incantation indoors. Besides the inn is having some kind of weirdly provincial games afternoon and several witches chanting is a sure way to ruin Charades.”
“I suppose that would put anyone off,” I agreed and held the door open so Étoile could step inside. She beckoned to her coterie to follow.
“This is Victoria, and this is Hayley. They are Chyler’s aunts,” Étoile said as she passed me, “and members of Andrea’s coven.”
“Hi,” I mumbled to the two women who each nodded briefly at me as they stepped past without saying anything. Chyler had seemed suspicious of them and I was instantly on my guard. That is if it was Chyler who I’d been speaking to at that moment and not the malicious spirit. All the same, being wary of strange witches was going to have to be a trait that I’d have to get very familiar with. Pun so not intended. I asked Étoile quietly, “Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on?”
Étoile looked around the room, her hands deep in the pockets of her navy wool coat; it was spotless after their last efforts at summoning Chyler, no thanks to them on either count. “When Seren and David get here they’ll set up the circles again, but this time they’ll be spelled and they’ll be stronger. Chyler and whatever that thing is won’t be able to get out,” she told me.
“And then what? You can’t just keep them in a circle in my living room forever.” I imagined myself inviting people in and oh, just step around the witch shrieking in the middle and try to pretend she’s not there. Awkward!
“We’re going to separate them.” Étoile nodded at her companions who were hovering. “That’s what they’re here for. Extra muscle. We need to banish this thing and they can help us by looking after Chyler while we get rid of it.”
“Banish it where?” I asked, addressing the hot topic first.
“It’s probably dead,” answered one of the witchy aunts. She was blonde and in her thirties and there was something about Chyler in her face, more so than in the other woman. “We’ll send it back.” She held out her hand and I shook it. Her grasp was cold. “Victoria,” she said, her voice low and businesslike. “Thanks for looking out for Chyler. Étoile told us. We drove all day to get here.”
“Uh, no problem.” I was clearly not completely in trouble about that anymore which was a relief. Well, some, anyway. Evan still hadn’t been in touch.
“It’s clearly malevolent from what your friends here told us,” added the smaller dark-haired woman, Hayley, who was ignoring the introductions and getting right to the point. “We think it killed Andrea and if it plans on staying in my niece, it’s definitely up to something.”
Victoria was willowy and blonde and dressed in a neat blue pantsuit with a white shell top. She would have looked more in place in a bank or a corporate office than around a cauldron, which was how I still thought of witches sometimes. Fairytales were hard to shake. Hayley was more what I would have described as witchy in her long black skirt and polo neck top with a mass of mid-brown curls that edged their way down her back. She wore long silver earrings and had several large rings on her fingers. I wouldn’t have had them pegged as sisters though perhaps they weren’t. Chyler had said both her parents had sisters; that would explain the differences in them.
“Really?” I couldn’t help keep the edge of sarcasm out of my voice.
“Hey, play nice with the other witches,” chided Étoile, but softly.
“Bad witch, no cookie?” I shot at her.
“Bad witch gets evil witch,” Étoile snipped.
“Tell us about Chyler,” I said to the aunts, after our mini face off. I gestured for Hayley and Victoria to take seats and they sat on the sofa, at opposite ends. I got the impression they weren’t close despite the family connection. “All we know is what we’ve read on the internet about her, about your family, and what we’ve heard second hand. And I’m not entirely sure if I’ve always been talking to Chyler either, or if I’ve been talking to the spirit. Her behaviour was erratic every time.”
“Chyler is a nice kid,” said Victoria. “She’s smart and popular and her parents were always very proud of her. She was just thinking about her college applications. She was the kind of daughter every parent wanted to have.”
“That’s why we were so worried when she started dabbling,” added Hayley. She had one of those commanding voices that made you automatically take note of what she was saying. “She just thought she could handle anything. She didn’t want to be taught so much as just get on with what she thought she should be doing. Andrea was so worried. She came to the regional council for help. She wanted to know how she could put Chyler off without coming down on her like an angry mom and making it all worse.”
“What was Chyler dabbling in?” I asked.
Hayley shuddered, closing her eyes briefly like she could hardly bear to think of it. “Dark magic,” she said after a long pause. “It all started when she felt one of her teachers had slighted her. She had been working really hard all semester on a project for her history teacher and she felt he gave her a lower mark than she deserved. She wanted revenge.”
“Did she get it?” asked Étoile.
“Oh yes.” Hayley paused. “She wasn’t vicious but it was mean stuff. He’d lose things or trip over in the corridors. He’d talk gibberish instead of giving a talk. Stuff that made all the other kids laugh at him.”
“It didn’t stop there,” added Victoria. “Her boyfriend dumped her a few months after that and she saw him with another girl. Chyler started a campaign taunting that girl and that was mean. She made sure all her school projects failed, her homework disappeared or was marked down, and her grades hit rock bottom. The other kids started ostracizing the girl.”
So far, Chyler was starting to sound like a mean girl. Everyone felt slighted in school, but Chyler had taken her revenge past whispering and pointed comments and used magic to make people feel as bad as she did.
“She realised just how much magic could do for her and, of course, there’s the book that belongs to our family. It started showing her things that she shouldn’t have been able to do, never mind encouraged to.” Hayley slipped a sideways glance at me and asked, almost casually, “Do you know where the book is now?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” It wasn’t exactly a lie; I had seen it, but I didn’t know what Chyler had done with it or if she still had it.
“The book belongs with the family,” said Victoria.
“Absolutely. I need to take it with me.” Hayley added like it was an afterthought. “With my sister gone... Chyler’s just not ready for it.”
“It’s very powerful?” murmured Étoile.
“Oh, it’s just our family spell book,” Hayley replied dismissively. She seemed to be taking pains to stay any interest in the book, speaking about it as if she was talking about a book of hand-me-down recipes rather than a book that not only absorbed power but also reinforced
the magic of its bearer.
“We’re almost certain Chyler has called something to her, another witch perhaps,” said Étoile, switching direction. “What could have made her call something like that?”
“We’ve been talking about that ever since you mentioned it,” said Victoria, pausing to glance at Hayley. “We don’t think she did mean to call something. Chyler’s got a mean streak and she’s felt like she’s had a hard time but we don’t think she’s evil or that she truly meant to do anything to hurt anyone, least of all her mom.”
“Are you sure she hurt her mom?” I asked.
“Her fingerprints were on the knife,” said Hayley sadly.
“Not that that means she did it,” interjected Victoria, slightly defensively. “Her hand, yes, but she might already have that thing inside her, controlling her. We don’t think she killed her mom. Andrea just got there at the wrong moment.”
“So how did this thing, this spirit, get into her?”
Victoria shrugged. “It takes something amazingly strong to come through and get inside someone else. It’s not just possession, it’s actually living if what we’ve been told is true.”
“We figured the more mean things she did, the more things she wanted to do and that made her more susceptible to anything malevolent. Perhaps the spirit was helping her and the meaner Chyler got, the stronger the spirit got. The spirit would have just had to wait for the right moment,” added Hayley.
“Wait. Spirit? Like a ghost?” I asked and they all nodded at me. I contemplated all the strange things I had to deal with that were living and breathing. I wasn’t sure about dealing with the dead, too. “Don’t dead things go to heaven?”
“Not always,” said Étoile with a knowing look. “Some balance somewhere between the dead and living and some dead things ... linger. They look for ways to come back.”
“But why would it kill Chyler’s mom?” I asked. “If it was about the book, it could have just snatched it, if it was already in her, right?” Too late, I realised I’d asked a question that I shouldn’t necessarily have known to ask. Hayley was trying to brush the spell book off as just a family possession to be returned and I’d just exposed her attempts to gloss over what it really was.
“Chyler became the keeper as soon as her mom died. The spirit would have known that and that would have made her a very attractive proposition,” said Hayley, echoing what I’d been told before but not volunteering any more information about the book.
“So this spirit, it has to be a witch, yes? Would anything else have been bothered about a spell book?” I had so many more questions my mind was tripping over itself: did spirits think? How could spirits think? Where there lots of them?
Victoria surprised me by agreeing. “She’s right. It could only have been a witch.”
“So how do we narrow it down which one?” I asked.
Étoile pulled a face. “I don’t think we can. We can’t even possibly begin to list all the dead witches. There’s a lot.” That did not sound promising.
“We have to lure it out,” said Victoria. “It’s the only way.”
Étoile nodded. “We came to the same conclusion this morning.” She turned to me. “Like I said before, Victoria and Hayley are the extra muscle. They’re connected with Chyler in a way that we aren’t – they’re biological relatives and that counts – so they can protect her as much as they can aid us. Seren and David are out searching for the things David will need to perform the right spells.”
“David?” frowned Victoria. “Do you mean David Langstrom? The same one who...”
Étoile cut her off with a simple, “Yes.”
Victoria and Hayley both looked impressed at the news and I wondered what it was that I didn’t know about David. The truth was I didn’t know much. I knew he’d been attacked and that had resulted in the long scar that cut through his face, but I didn’t know what had happened, or by whom. I did know that Seren and Étoile trusted him and that Evan thought highly of him. Even if I didn’t know much else about him, those were the important things. They had to count for something.
“When are they going to get here?” I asked.
“Soon.” Étoile closed her eyes for a moment and her face was completely still. When she opened them again, she said, “They’re on their way and they have everything they need.”
When they arrived just ten minutes later Seren and David didn’t waste time chatting with our guests. Instead David busied himself in the kitchen preparing a foul smelling concoction of several herbs that he either boiled or crushed and then mixed together into a curiously coloured paste, while Seren hovered around him. I soon realised I was in the way and retreated to the living room where Étoile was questioning Hayley and Victoria further about their niece. I stood to one side, tucked out the way, listening and wondering where the hell Evan was. After a while, David and Seren returned with a plastic bowl and spatula and set them on the floor, in the widest part of the room, both kneeling beside the bowl.
There was symmetry in David and Seren’s movements as they created two chalk circles side by side, each with an inner circle, leaving a small gap in the perimeter of each one. They chalked two lines between the two circles, creating a thin channel to connect the two. The thin strip between circles was daubed with the thick globs of the paste. Now that I had had a recent burst of homeowner’s pride I was not at all happy with what they were doing to the hardwood floors which, in my opinion, were the best feature of the house. The yucky paste mixture had better come up or the bitch in this witch was going to come back and bite them.
“Why are they doing that?” I asked Étoile as pleasantly as I could muster, trying not to wince at the mess Seren and David were making.
“When Evan brings Chyler she’ll need to be contained in one circle, and she’ll need to stay contained when we separate the spirit from her. One circle will protect her; the other will keep that thing apart from her so it can’t hurt her again. The chalk is stronger than the salt and the herb mixture is spelled so the thing can’t get free. We won’t lose it this time.”
“You really think this will work?”
“It has to.” Étoile did not look thrilled at any hint of failure, but then she’d been sent to investigate. I wondered how much she had to lose.
“Enough,” Étoile whispered and squeezed my hand.
“How can you even separate them? What if it won’t come out of Chyler?”
Victoria said, “It’s hard but it can be done.”
“And if it doesn’t work?” Chyler’s aunts exchanged looks that made my heart sink. I asked, “She dies, right?”
“She’s going to die anyway,” Étoile said gently. “Two beings can’t exist in one body, not long term. One eventually edges the other out. Chyler may be strong but it’s doubtful that she will win. This is her only option. This is the only way she can survive.”
It sounded to me like Chyler was stuck between a rock and a hard place. “What happens to her afterwards, if it works?” I asked.
“She’ll be just fine, physically. We don’t know what trauma has happened to her psychologically but she’s a fighter. She’s been fighting it. That’s how she’s lasted so long,” replied Étoile.
“But it’s only been a few days. Not more than a couple of weeks,” I protested.
“And it’s amazing that she’s lasted that long. A lesser witch would have been destroyed by now.” Étoile didn’t sound overly optimistic and I wanted to ask more when David got to his feet and, after helping Seren up in a gentlemanly gesture, took the few steps towards us.
“We’re ready,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the almost conjoined circles. “Here’s what we need to do.”
We stood in a circle like hyperactive teens who couldn’t face sitting down while David explained what he wanted from us.
Bringing Chyler here was, apparently, the simple part. This time we weren’t going to practise a summoning spell. Instead, Étoile and Seren were to send Evan a message using th
eir telepathy while the rest of us would wait in our assigned stations around the perimeter of the circles. While the potion David and Seren had daubed in the circles would ultimately act as a catalyst for his spells, we would link together, simply by holding hands, so he could draw on our collective power to fuel the spell that would separate the spirit from Chyler and then hold them both within the circles. It felt like we were a bit like the United Nations of Witches with our motley meld of spell casting and blood magic working in harmony. I hoped it would work.
When I moved to take my place, David motioned to me with a nod of his head to follow him. It was then that he explained the most dangerous part of his plan, the part meant just for me, the part no one else could know about, her murmured as I absorbed the enormity, the danger, of what he was asking me to do. I wanted to tell him he was crazy, out of his mind crazy.
“It’s the only way,” he said in his low voice and I could see how worried he was. “You don’t know it yet, but you’re going to be more powerful than any of us. We can all see it, Étoile, Seren and I, and that makes you important here. If I could ask any of the others, I would.”
“I understand,” I said, trying not to let my fear show. “I’ll do it.”
From my position I could see that outside long shadows were being cast from the house over the lawn and that the full moon hung low and heavy in the sky. I hoped fervently that Annalise and Gage had stayed away from home tonight. It was bad enough that my house was serving as the venue for all this, but I didn’t want them stumbling across something they shouldn’t. Certainly something I couldn’t explain.
Unruly Magic (#2 Stella Mayweather Paranormal Series) Page 20
