Witch Bound (Devilborn Book 3)

by Jen Rasmussen

  I said a quiet prayer of thanks that Cooper wasn’t with us. Although he’d disliked the idea of me leaving Bristol without him, fragile as I’d become, he’d grudgingly agreed that we hardly needed five of us to do this. Lydia was coming to help Max. Arabella was coming because it was, in a way, her house, and because she knew Serena better than any of us. We didn’t need Cooper, too. And there were other leads for him to chase.

  As luck would have it, one such lead came up, conveniently timed with our trip: a property in Colorado that evidence suggested might belong to the Wicks. When he’d exhausted all his remote resources, Cooper went to check the place out in person, while the rest of us came to Boston.

  But he made his cousin swear she would let me come to no harm, which was why Arabella agreed so easily to keep what had just happened between us. Apparently she had some concern that hemorrhaging from my eyeballs might count as harm.

  And now I was about to add to her worries. “Arabella, you need to know something. About Serena.”

  “Okay,” she said, her face becoming guarded.

  “They’ve blinded her.”

  “Both eyes?”

  “Both. And… a couple of chunks of her face. At least one of her hands. I don’t know what else they’ve done to her. She’s in the dark, and it’s cold. That’s all I know.”

  “Well.” Arabella turned away from me to rinse out the washcloth. When she spoke again her voice was brisk, matter-of-fact. “I guess if she can’t see, that explains why she didn’t give us any clues about where to find her. She probably has no idea where she is.”

  I knew better than to press her for talk of feelings. Outpourings of emotion were not Arabella’s way, especially not where her stepmother was concerned. “Let’s go downstairs and see if Max found anything more useful,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Arabella muttered as we left the bathroom. “I shouldn’t have made you—”

  “It’s fine. Really. It was a good idea. And I did get something. Every little bit helps at this point, right?”

  But I only said it to be optimistic, and because she looked so guilty. Wasn’t that what they always said in detective movies, that every detail counted, that any information was helpful? Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure it was true in this case. I didn’t see how in a cold room really narrowed down Serena’s location all that much. I just had to hope the others had had better luck.

  Lydia and Max were still sitting at the breakfast table, Max humming slowly and somewhat tonelessly, although the tune was vaguely familiar.

  “What’s going on down here?” I asked.

  “I might ask the same of you,” said Lydia. “Where’d you two run off to?”

  “Serena’s room,” I said. “Arabella thought that since I have such a connection to the house, I might be able to connect to Serena through it, too.”

  “Any luck?”

  “A little.” I glanced at Max, who had stopped humming. His face was placid, but he could be easily upset. I didn’t want to get into the gory details in front of him. “I think she’s been hurt. She can’t see. So that doesn’t help us much with where she is.”

  “I saw red glasses,” Max said. “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry now.”

  Lydia stood up. “I think Max has gotten all he’s going to get here, and I don’t think it’ll do him a lot of good to stay. What do you say we go get some dinner, and he can tell you all about what he saw at the restaurant?”

  “Good idea,” I said, feeling that if I got out of Number Twelve that instant, it wouldn’t be a moment too soon. And that if I never saw the place again, I would count myself lucky for it.

  An hour later, we were settled in a booth in an Irish pub out in the suburbs. Max was so delighted with his bangers and mash (and the fact that he’d been allowed to have a soda, something Martha denied him) that it took a while before he could focus on what he’d seen back in the kitchen at Number Twelve.

  “You said red glasses, Max.” I pointed at the translucent red plastic cup he was currently slurping from. “Like that one?”

  Max shook his head. “The kind of glasses you see through.”

  “Oh. The frames were red, like the outsides? Or the lenses, the middles?”

  Max rolled his eyes. “I was nine when I stopped, not four. I know what lenses are.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. The lenses were invisible. The plastic part was red. Bright red.”

  “Did you see who was wearing the glasses?” Lydia asked.

  It was a good question, since Serena certainly had no need of them.

  “No. They were on the table by the couch. I wasn’t wearing them when I was playing the video games, because I didn’t need them for that. But then I put them on because I was going outside.”

  “So you were seeing through the eyes of someone else?” Arabella asked. “Who? It obviously wasn’t Serena.”

  “No,” said Max, suddenly blushing. “I wasn’t a lady. I had a… you know… a thing.”

  “Did you notice anything else about the person wearing the glasses, besides that he was a man?” I asked.

  “I don’t think he was a man. I think he was a boy, like me. Only a regular boy, in his normal time. Not a stopped one who got big. Can we get dessert?”

  “Finish your potatoes first,” said Lydia.

  I looked around at the others, confused. “The house connected him to someone besides Serena? How did that happen?”

  “Serena is a seer, remember?” Arabella said. “Maybe Max connected to Serena, but she connected to this boy. Maybe she uses the boy to see.”

  Max nodded. “The witch wanted me to go outside. I mean, she wanted red-glasses-boy-me to go outside. That’s why I went. I think she knew that Max-me was watching. And she wanted Max-me to see what was out there.” He took another long drink of soda. “I guess the boy is like one of my spider friends.”

  “Okay,” Lydia said. “So what did you see out there, through spider boy’s eyes?”

  “My breath. It was cold.”

  “Good!” said Lydia. “That’s a great detail, Max. Was there snow on the ground?”

  “I think so. A little.”

  “Anything else?” Lydia asked.

  “There were bushes.”

  “Bushes, okay, and—”

  “And they had shapes. They were in shapes.”

  “The bushes were in shapes?” asked Arabella.

  “Yeah.”

  “Like animals?” I asked, thinking of the topiaries at a botanical garden I’d been to once.

  “No, the animals were real.”

  He lost me there. “Which animals were real?”

  “The ones in the zoo. But that’s on the other side from the bushes. It was a long walk to the zoo. That was why we were at the table for so long.”

  “Okay, let’s back up to the bushes for a second,” I said. “What kind of shapes?”

  “Like lines and things. Like a…” Max screwed up his face, trying to remember a word. “Like those puzzles in the book I had in the car. Where you use a pencil to get to the other side.”

  “A maze!” I said, feeling I’d just solved a puzzle myself. “A hedge maze.”

  Max shrugged.

  “And there was a zoo, too?” I asked. “All on this same property?”

  “Yes. I didn’t go into the zoo, but I saw the llamas and the scary cat from outside the fence.”

  “A scary cat?”

  “It was smaller than the tiger we saw at the regular zoo, but it was still big enough to be scary. It looked mean. And there was a pool. There were lots of buildings. And a big man singing about Mary the miller’s wife.”

  “A man singing about a miller’s wife,” Arabella repeated, looking more and more skeptical.

  “Yes, but he’s not a nice man. I think people who sing should be nice.” Max took one last giant mouthful of mashed potatoes, as the server approached with dessert menus.

  “Okay, don’t choke yourself, you can order
whatever you want for dessert,” said Lydia. “Do you remember anything else about this mean singing man?”

  Max swallowed the last of his food and said, “He has long teeth. And they’re sharp. There are a lot of nice things in that place, but there are scary things, too. It’s a very big place.”

  By that point, I felt just about as skeptical as Arabella looked. An entire zoo in the backyard, a long-toothed monster. This place was sounding more and more like it might be imaginary as well as big. “Max, are you sure the boy with the glasses wasn’t dreaming?”

  “No, he was running. He was going to hide.”

  “Hide from who?” I asked. “The witch?”

  “No. The singing man with the long teeth. Is mud pie made with real mud?”

  Once he’d decided on a dessert and we’d put our orders in, Max turned to me, his stare solemn. “The boy with the red glasses is nice. Don’t hurt him.”

  “Of course we won’t hurt him. I hope we won’t have to hurt anybody.”

  I said the soothing words automatically, but truth be told, I wasn’t all that concerned with whether we hurt anybody, especially not Wicks, if that was what it took to end the curse. I’d found that spending weeks in the grip of pain and hallucinations had done a lot to reduce my compassion for my fellow man. Although I would allow that hurting minor children was a bit below the standard of behavior I’d have liked to uphold.

  We stayed in a hotel that night, Arabella and I sharing one room, Lydia and Max in an adjoining room next door. Arabella tried to talk while we got ready for bed, but I was in a bad mood, both exhausted from the day, and feeling it had been a waste. I ached for Bristol, as I always did when I was separated from the piece of my soul I’d bound there.

  I answered her attempts to analyze the things Max had told us with as many monosyllables as I could get away with, until finally she cornered me in the bathroom while I brushed my teeth.

  “Hey, I know you’re literally sick and tired, but it’s really not that bad,” she said. “We have a lot more details now than we had before we came.”

  “Sure,” I said. “We just need to find a man with long teeth wandering around a hedge maze, and we’re home free. Oh, and a cold room. Because that really narrows it down.” I shook my head and walked out of the bathroom to get into bed.

  “The cold room, plus Max seeing his breath outside, and snow on the ground, that could all be Colorado,” said Arabella.

  “We’d just better hope Cooper finds something out there,” I said as she turned out the light. “Because at this point, the odds of either your stepmother or me living through the winter don’t look good.”

  I dreamed of empty, bleeding eye sockets, and cruel laughter sounding over cries of pain, of Mary the miller’s wife wearing red glasses, and a maze made of giant teeth.

  None of which was the least bit helpful.

  Go on, then. It’s now or never, you know. I won’t be able to manage this much longer.

  The block of rough, beige stone I’d been infusing with my will for the past ten minutes moved at last, settling itself, firm and true, on the stone below it.

  Nice job!

  I smiled at the ankle-high wall as if it was a toddler who would understand and appreciate my approval. I’d been rebuilding the ruined stable behind the Mount Phearson Hotel—or more accurately, helping the old stable rebuild itself—for more than two months, ever since my return to Bristol after my ill-fated Halloween. No matter how bad the curse got, how difficult it became to get out of bed in the morning and drag myself through these woods, I kept coming back. In fact, the only extended break I’d taken was the trip back to Boston in December, to collect a few meager bits of scattered information and two bloody eyes.

  The stable wasn’t much more fertile ground than Number Twelve had been, although it was at least a great deal friendlier. Some four scant feet of low wall, formed from the debris around the area, was all there was to show for my efforts. It was long, slow, exhausting work, lending my own will and magic to the place, to do with what it would.

  There was no mortar, nothing to keep the stones from falling down again, but so far nothing had knocked them over, not even the blustering snowstorm we’d had just after Christmas. The stable was holding its own against the elements, this time. Its energy was strong.

  It only needed me to direct that energy, to fuse it with a bit of my own, and to help it grow. I was determined that eventually, this place would get the happy ending it craved.

  Unless, I was forced to admit as without warning my breaths started coming too short and too fast, I came to my own tragic ending first. A month had passed since our visit to Number Twelve Fenwick Street, and as I’d feared, a hedge maze and a singing man with long teeth were not enough to lead us to the address where Serena was being held.

  Cooper’s Colorado trip had proved equally fruitless. And although he’d been searching property records for all of Cillian Wick’s known aliases, and cross-checking them against satellite photos that might show a place like Max described, no more leads, promising or otherwise, emerged.

  In the meanwhile, I refused, despite Cooper’s every effort to the contrary, to let the curse stop me from practicing my story magic as close to daily as I could manage. I worked not only at the ruined stable, but all over the hotel and its grounds, sometimes cultivating the extension of place-magic that had saved our lives last fall, sometimes trying to weave my own personal story spells—in real time rather than in writing.

  I was making less progress than I would have liked on the latter. I’d been writing my stories down all my life, and I felt crippled without a pen and paper to channel my will through. But those tools were quickly becoming impossible to use. I could scarcely spare the blood to make spell ink anymore; I was far too weak. And even when I risked it, the ink was less potent, less reliable. My very blood was cursed.

  Frustrating as it was to try to direct my will unaided, I had no choice but to keep trying. If I couldn’t be strong in body, or even in mind, I needed to increase my power in other ways.

  But it was time to stop for now. My hands and feet were tingling, my face was hot and clammy, and I was sweating despite the January chill. Most concerning of all, my heart hammered erratically in a way that couldn’t be written off as mere fatigue from working strenuous magic all morning. I pushed up my sleeve to check my bruise.

  It was moving.

  Crawling, to be more precise. As if dozens, maybe even hundreds, of tiny little worms were wriggling around beneath the surface of my skin.

  It was never a good sign, when it did that.

  I turned away from the stable with barely a thought of goodbye. I needed to get out of the woods, before things got really bad.

  Yet I made my way back only slowly, the way an arthritic old woman would walk, following the trail I’d worn into the underbrush and the distant, muffled sounds of construction, the last phase of the Mount Phearson’s ambitious renovations. They were building a new stable at the edge of the grounds, and clearing some land to be used for pasture and a couple of riding rings. The real draw would be guided trail rides through the woods. I hoped these wouldn’t come too near the old stable; I hadn’t told it yet that it was being replaced.

  My aching knees and hips made their displeasure known with every step, and my breathing became more and more labored. But inconvenient as they were, the myriad physical ailments weren’t the real problem. Shadows were already moving at the edges of my vision.

  They were coming.

  Don’t look. Don’t believe.

  They’re not real. None of it is real. It’s just the curse.

  All around me, the woods seemed to thicken, trees springing up where there were none before, multiplying, growing, darkening, until they blotted out the winter sun. The air grew warmer and more humid.

  Don’t believe.

  I stepped doggedly on. The shadows gathered closer and took shape. Shapes I refused to look directly at.

  They’re not real. It
’s just the curse.

  I saw a break in the trees up ahead, and smiled with relief. I’d come farther than I’d realized. That had to be the hotel grounds. I’d be back soon, I would get inside, and then it would be easier. I could go up to my suite and rest in safety until this attack passed. I quickened my pace, despite the pain.

  But it wasn’t the hotel. Of course it wasn’t.

  The ground that should have been falling rose instead. Then the woods fell aside, giving way to tall grass. A hill, bigger and steeper than it had been in real life, loomed ahead of me. Atop it was a house I knew well, despite having only visited it twice in my life.

  I was back at Cayuga Lake. Back at the house Alex Blackwood had shared with Lily Wick and the bodies of the dead children he’d fed to her.

  It’s not real. None of it is real.

  It’s just the curse.

  Don’t believe.

  As had become my habit during an attack, I repeated these instructions over and over like a mantra, in an endless loop. But I knew it did me little good. Even if I could resist the temptation to believe what my senses told me, the knowledge that this was only a hallucination was of little practical value, once I was already inside it. How did I walk back out of it again? Which way should I go? For all I knew, in the real world I was walking myself deeper into the woods, into a ditch, off the edge of a crag.

  I stopped moving.

  No, don’t do that. You’ll get stuck. Falling and hitting your head against a rock would be better than getting stuck inside this place.

  Just move forward. Breathe. Keep your head. It’ll pass if you don’t buy into it.

  But the shadows were too close now. I couldn’t just see them. I could hear them, smell them.

  They could touch me.

  One of them stepped in front of me, no longer a shadow, but a solid child of about seven or eight. I’d met him before, thanks to this curse. Gordon, I called him, although I never knew if that was really his name. He was one of Alex’s kids. One of Lily’s. His lips were blue, his eyes milky white, his face stony and accusing.

  “You could have stopped this from happening,” he said, in a perfectly normal little boy’s voice.