It didn’t get far. The was a pop, and then the front corner of the truck dipped. Metal grinded on asphalt. The front tire was out.
“I love you, Rhonda,” Carl breathed, tears in his voice. “I love you so much.”
“The girls,” Rhonda croaked. “The girls—oh, God, Carl, our babies.”
They had to run. It was slim but it was the only option. But Carl couldn’t; not with a bolt in his legs. The girls, though—they could run.
A new noise split the darkness. Not a crossbow, but a bullet shot. Then another. There was a flash of light—a car’s headlights—and then a squeal of rubber. A door opened. More shots.
“Get in!” It was an unfamiliar voice.
Carl twisted, and looked into the road toward the voice.
“Who is it?” Rhonda breathed.
“Don’t know,” Carl answered, wary but pained. “He’s got a gun and it’s pointed the other way, though.”
“Go,” she said. “Tell the girls.”
Carl yelled into the cabin for the girls to grab the stones and get into the new car. More gunshots fired, one-two, into the darkness.
“This is gonna hurt, baby,” Carl grunted.
They screamed together as Carl heaved his wife off of the floor of the bed. Once she was up, she managed to get herself onto the ground unceremoniously, and used her good arm to help Carl out. He still landed on the ground.
The other car was a a truck, it turned out. The man crouched behind the open driver’s side door had a scruffy face and messed brown hair, but he aimed the gun like he knew what to do with it. He poked his head from cover and popped off two more shots.
“Almost out,” he called. “Hurry!”
Rhonda accepted help from her girls to get into the back of the old truck, and then helped them get their father in as well. Carl and Rhonda both hit the floor and laid there unmoving, groaning from their wounds.
One door shut, and then another, and then the truck moved, speeding off down the dark highway. Moments later the back window of the cab opened, and Mary’s head poked through. “Mom? Dad?”
“We’re alive,” Rhonda said. It was about the best she could offer. “Who… is it?”
“He says he’ll take us to Coven Grove,” Mary said.
“What’s… name?” Rhonda asked. She was hot. Her tongue felt thick.
Mary looked away, and then back to her mom. “Seamus,” she said. “Seamus Jackson. He says he knows the Queen!”
Rhonda smiled up at the stars as they started to blur and make streaks across the sky, as if they were all speeding toward the west, keeping pace with the truck as it flew along the highway.
“Thank you,” she said—to the man who’d saved them, and to her husband for gifting her with two beautiful girls, and to the girls themselves for being so amazing.
She closed her eyes, knowing it wouldn’t all go to waste.
Chapter 26
Bailey picked her way through the Caves in almost total darkness. She didn’t need the benefit of the candles that had been strewn around the place. Maybe even better than her own house, she knew every inch of these Caves so well that she could feel the shape of them around her, humming quietly—too quietly—with ancient magic.
She could visualize the paintings on the walls as she went. The long, curling, artful coils of Cyrillic, and Hebrew, and Ancient Chinese, and pictographs from civilizations that never lasted long enough to write their names on history’s record. And others. All of them, it sometimes seemed. Nonsense, she’d once thought.
Now, of course, she knew that wasn’t the case. They were stories, and spells, and initiations—layers upon layers of history and magic meant as much to impart knowledge and power to the guardians of the Caves, as to craft the strange intelligence of the Caves themselves.
That intelligence, that spirit of the place—the Genius Loci of the Seven Caves—was weak. She could feel it here now more clearly than she’d ever been able to before she’d met Itaja. Probably because it was shaped from the same primal magic she was now infected with.
No; not infected. She couldn’t work if she saw it like that. But it was hard to feel like it had been gifted to her.
The Seventh Cave was the place where she’d once crossed into Faerie itself with Aiden, walking through a magical door to find and bring back a little girl. It seemed like that was ages ago, but it wasn’t—just a few months.
Just the brief opening had let in a Faerie trickster, Amadhan Dubh. People had died. Maybe it was paranoia, but Bailey no longer took any chances that there was so much as a crack open to let him in again. Already he’d come back to possess Seamus Jackson.
She pressed her hand to the back of the seventh Cave, and closed her eyes as she finally answered the pressured call of her magic and let it course up along her spine and down her arms. She breathed slowly out as she let tendrils of it pass through her palm and into the stone, and from there in a direction that was somehow at a wrong angle to reality—into the place between, where the Caves were linked to a wall.
That wall was thin now, and weak. Like wet sheetrock, ready to collapse at any moment. She dared not press too hard and test it, for fear she’d smash a hole in it accidentally.
She withdrew her magic, and sighed.
“It’s still fighting to keep us safe,” a wizened voice said.
Bailey looked up. She hadn’t sensed any change, but Rita Hope had apparently used whatever secret door led into the seventh Cave from her abode in the secret eighth Cave below—or, maybe not even there.
“The stones are mostly here,” Bailey said. “We’re just missing six more.”
“Yes,” Rita said. She shuffled around in the dark as easily as Bailey did, until she was close enough that Bailey could smell the spring-and-fall scent of the crone. “That’s what I called you here for.”
“Called me?” Bailey asked. “I didn’t—”
“Because I didn’t want to sound a bullhorn the way you did,” Rita grumbled. “Anita wants to see you.”
Bailey frowned. “Is she…?”
Rita didn’t respond. She turned, and led Bailey to a section of wall that had no opening on it that Bailey could sense. But when she followed Rita, they nonetheless passed into a narrow gap and walked the winding, downward sloped path to where the crones lived.
“I can’t help asking anymore,” Bailey said as they walked. “Is your Cave really… in the world?”
“It’s in a world,” Rita said.
Even at a time like this, Rita wasn’t about to give up secrets. Bailey couldn’t help but smile at that. Maybe the whole world would change—but Rita Hope would stay the same, probably no matter what happened.
They emerged into a small grove at the height of summer. It was warm, and the sunny sky above shone down with lances of light that illuminated motes of pollen or floating seeds as they swirled in the air. Bailey shook her head for a moment, mystified as ever.
It was then, though, that she noticed they weren’t alone.
There were other witches in the crones’ Cave. They were hunched, and leaned on staves or canes or sat in wheel chairs. There were perhaps a dozen of them.
Bailey almost ran into Rita.
“Who… Rita, where did these women come from?”
“They came with the others,” Rita muttered.
“I didn’t see them,” Bailey countered. “I’ve met all the travelers.”
Rita’s ancient face scrunched sourly. “Well, I’m sure you must be right, then, your majesty.”
Bailey opened her mouth to pitch some attitude back at the old woman, but canned it before it came out. “I thought I was here to meet Anita.”
“You are,” Rita said. She waved Bailey on, and together they crossed the grove—which seemed to be larger now than it had been before—toward the cabin. The cabin also seemed somehow larger, even though it was the same shape. Looking at the whole of it became difficult after a moment, so Bailey focused on the ground in front of her until they stepped ont
o the porch.
None of the other crones seemed to care much that she was among them. In a way, that was refreshing. Still, it did prickle at her just a bit. They ranged from women not unlike Rita herself—hunched and dressed in simple garments with little decoration—to vastly different. One of them had a distinctly Chinese appearance to her, with an elaborate mound of hair decorated with small flowers, and a flowing red and gold robe. She was engaged in conversation with two other women, one of them a long necked black woman who had a similar style of decoration to Alkina.
“Is that the crone from Australia?” Bailey asked.
Rita snorted. “I don’t know. We have more important things to discuss than where we’re all from. At our ages, we don’t waste words.”
Bailey thought that a simple “I don’t know” might have sufficed.
They entered the cabin, and Bailey saw what the problem was. Like the Cave itself, the inside of the cabin was larger than it should have been. She’d peeked at the inside once before, and it had seemed like a simple, open place with a table, a small kitchen, and some ancient furniture.
Now, though, there were hallways leading off of the walls, and the main room was much larger, sporting a variety of chairs and sofas that all looked like they’d been taken from thrift stores without any thought toward decoration so much as functionality. And, for all Bailey knew, they had been. There was a small army of earth spirits that served the crones, and they seemed capable of all manner of mischief.
Rita didn’t lead Bailey down one of the hallways, though. She took her to a door, and then gestured at it with her cane. “She’s waiting in there.”
Apparently, Rita wasn’t coming with her. That seemed strange, but Bailey didn’t press for an explanation; Rita probably wouldn’t give her one.
She lifted the simple latch and pressed the wooden door open silently. The room was gently lit by a number of oil lamps that made no smoke. She entered cautiously, and closed the door quietly behind her.
“Anita?” Bailey asked.
The other Hope sister was in a small bed, barely a twin size, covered in blankets. She opened her eyes when she heard Bailey, and smiled weakly before she pushed the blankets down a bit and waved Bailey toward her.
Bailey went to the side of the bed and at Anita’s insistent reach, took the old woman’s hand and helped her to sit up.
“Rita said you were sick,” Bailey said. “That was weeks ago. How are you feeling?”
Anita’s thin lips tugged up into a smile. “As well as can be expected. Resting, finally, I think.”
Bailey wondered what she’d been up to if she was only just resting, and almost asked. Rita, though, had mentioned that they preferred not to waste words. Maybe it had been a kind of warning, or instruction. There was a chair near the bed, and Bailey took it so that her head was level with Anita’s.
“What did you want to see me for?” Bailey asked.
“Rita gave you my message,” Anita said. “And the sweater.”
“Yes,” Bailey said. “The sweater helped us. So did the message; although, I didn’t know you meant—”
“No,” Anita said. She shook her head. “My message has not helped you. Not yet.”
Bailey’s heart became a bit louder in her ears. “I… oh. Alright.”
“Do you remember?” Anita asked.
“The rain is cold,” Bailey said quietly, “but I must… not be. Right?”
Anita nodded, and then sighed. She reached for the side table, and Bailey realized there was a cup of hot tea there which hadn’t been a moment before. It gave her the sudden feeling that they weren’t alone, or that something might brush her leg any moment.
“If I haven’t benefitted from it yet,” Bailey said slowly, “then what does it mean? How will it help now?”
“That’s not how it works,” Anita said. There was sympathy in her voice, though. She was much easier to talk to than Rita. Maybe that was why Rita generally did the talking. She sipped her tea gingerly and then clutched it with her frail hands as she lowered her eyelids. After a moment, she handed the tea to Bailey. “Sip.”
Bailey did as she was told. The tea was scalding hot, and bitter to the point that she almost wretched just from the sip, and when her lips came away she had grit on them—tea leaves. The cup had a thick sediment at the bottom, obscured by the darkness of the tea and the dim lighting.
“Hand it here,” Anita said, and accepted the cup back from Bailey. She swirled it a few times, and then poured it carelessly over the edge of the bed, onto the wooden floor.
Bailey’s instinct was to reach out and keep it from spilling, but she wasn’t fast enough.
Anita chuckled. “The gnomes will get it,” she said. “They don’t mind.”
“Uh… right,” Bailey murmured. “So. What do you see?”
“See?” Anita asked.
Bailey gestured at the empty cup. “In the tea leaves.”
“Oh,” Anita said. She shook her head, and gave a thin laugh. “I don’t need tea leaves to tell fortunes, girl. The tea is awful. Don’t you agree? I saw your face. An old joke the little devils play on me from time to time. Their way of… well, it doesn’t matter. No, I didn’t call you here to read tea leaves like some old gypsy.”
Bailey gaped, and then looked down at the spilled tea. It was already cleaned. She nearly pulled her feet up onto the chair.
“You are a bright girl,” Anita said. “And you’ve taken on a great responsibility before you were ready.”
“Is it that obvious?” Bailey asked.
Anita ignored the question. “But you sometimes take what you see for granted. You make assumptions before you have the whole picture; or before you realize you already have it.”
Bailey frowned, but nodded. “Okay.”
“In the days to come you will be shown several such pictures,” Anita went on. “You cannot jump at the first conclusion you come to. Do not let time become your enemy. If you rush—if you feel as though there is not enough time—then our enemies will have the advantage.”
“Which ones?” Bailey asked.
Anita shrugged her boney shoulders. “Whichever ones you make enemies of.”
“I didn’t make enemies of the Faerie,” Bailey pointed out. “Or the hunters—they came after us.”
“Did they?” Anita wondered.
Bailey sighed, and measured her tone. “Yes, they did. That’s what hunters do. We didn’t go looking for…”
Anita raised an eyebrow, and then after a moment nodded once. “Good. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll rest. Send Rita in, please, when you go. And try not to be so hard on yourself. I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Remember the rain.”
As confused now as she had been when she came in, Bailey stood, and had to struggle not to roll her eyes. She didn’t doubt there was some kind of wisdom that had just been imparted, but damned if she knew what it was. Crones. Even in the eleventh hour, they never gave anything away for free.
“I’ll get Rita,” Bailey said. She paused at the door, though, and turned slowly around.
Anita gave her a gentle, inquisitive look.
“Wait… Anita, when you say ‘rest’… do you mean…?”
“When you get a chance,” Anita said, “look for a young witch from Taiwan. She’ll have something for you that I think you’ll like.”
“That’s not an answer, Anita,” Bailey said. “I hate to pull rank, but word is I’m the queen now. I think you have to at least be straight with me this once.” She folded her arms over her chest and waited.
Anita chuffed, and waved a hand to shoo her away. “Never you mind, young lady. In this place there are no queens, or crones, or mothers, or maidens. Here, all beings are equals.”
Bailey’s arms dropped to her sides, her irritation peaking. But…
She didn’t want the last thing she said to Anita to be something said in frustration.
“I hope you rest well, Anita,” Bailey said instead.
Anita smil
ed. “I believe I will, your majesty. Give your mother my regards when you see her.”
There was a twinkle in Anita’s eye when she said it, some kind of private joke, perhaps. Who knew? The crones always seemed like they never said just one thing when they spoke. Layers and layers; that’s what you got from them.
Hopefully, some of those layers would make sense soon.
Chapter 27
The Clearys’ house was no longer surrounded by cars when Chloe, Frances, and Peitr made it there. That, though, only made it somehow more imposing. Neither of Xavier’s parents were likely be give them a warm welcome—especially not if they intended to do magic in their home at this particular moment.
But the only thing that Chloe could do was ask, and plead their case. And then trust Peitr, which was a prospect she was ambivalent about at best. Warlocks weren’t known for their trustworthiness. Then again, she’d never met one before.
“Wait here,” Chloe said to both Peitr and Frances when they reached the foot of the steps to the porch. “Let me talk to them first.”
Frances nodded, and tugged her shawl around her. She had a worried, sunken look to her; and probably for the same reason Chloe likely did—they’d been up through the night, and it was now almost dawn.
Chloe could sense the two minds in the house, up and active, but wouldn’t have needed her gift to know that. No parent could have slept after what happened to them. She approached the door with no small amount of anxiety, and knocked on it loudly enough to get the Clearys’ attention, but not so loud as to alarm them.
It took a moment, but eventually Doug Cleary came to the door and opened it. There was, at first, a desperately hopeful look on his face—until he realized who had come.
“You,” he sighed. “Just leave us in peace, will you?”
He started to close the door, but Chloe put her hand on it. “Please, Mister Cleary—if you could just hear me out, we have a lead.” It wasn’t precisely true, but it was close enough.
That gave him pause. He mulled it for a moment, trying to decide whether to believe her or not. “Did you go to the Sheriff with it?”
Witching for a Miracle (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 7) Page 12
