Resurrection

by Nancy Holder

  Five notes. La, la, la, la-la.

  Owen.

  Her face went numb. He was too little to sing. She wasn’t really hearing it. Someone was making her think she was. It was this house, this terrible, evil house.

  But remember what happened that day, when Nicole said he spoke and he transformed before her eyes? She shivered.

  “We’re going to move out of here,” she said aloud. And suddenly she meant it. She would do whatever was necessary to get Nicole to leave. The house, or castle, or whatever it was, belonged to a dynasty of murderous, barbaric warlocks. Not the right kind of place to raise a child.

  But the book… It had foretold about Seattle, Holly’s possession, everything.

  “I’ll tell them about the book,” she said.

  No. It is for you. The book is for you. Do not tell.

  “I…,” she murmured, suddenly confused. What had she been thinking about?

  La, la, la, la-la. Chills went down her spine; she opened the door and poked in her head.

  “Nicole?” she whispered. She walked past Richard’s door and opened the door leading to the bedroom Nicole shared with Owen. She hesitated, afraid to open it—afraid of what she would see. What it might mean.

  No one is going to kill Owen.

  La, la, la, la-la.

  She kept her flashlight lowered, afraid to announce her presence, but more afraid to move through the dark without it.

  She heard squeaking.

  Footsteps. Rapid, and small, across the room.

  Chills washed over her. She tried to call Nicole’s name, but her throat was bone-dry. The arm holding the flashlight seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. She couldn’t move.

  The footsteps changed direction. They were headed for her.

  Her mouth worked; her thumb played over the flashlight switch. She couldn’t make it go on, couldn’t make it work…

  …and then a tiny hand slipped into her free hand, and gave her a little squeeze.

  He’s not walking yet.

  “Nicole!” she screamed.

  At once the room flowed with light from Nicole’s bedside. Nicole was leaping out of bed. At the same time, Owen started wailing—from his cradle.

  “Amanda, what’s wrong?” Nicole cried as she grabbed up Owen and ran to Amanda.

  There was no one standing beside Amanda. No one had squeezed her hand. No one visible, anyway.

  “Oh, Nicole,” she said, bursting into tears. Owen began to wail.

  “Amanda,” Nicole said, rushing to embrace her.

  At the same time, Richard appeared in the doorway, in a white T-shirt and black sweatpants. He flicked on more lights.

  “What’s wrong?” he shouted, gazing around the room as he ran to them.

  Don’t tell him. It was a voice deep inside her, maybe the same one that had sung the eerie little tune and squeezed her hand. Maybe the one that had urged her to call for Tommy when she’d been trapped in the secret tunnel. She didn’t know what to do. Her father was protecting them, but he wasn’t a member of their magical circle.

  “Amanda?” That was Tommy, thundering into the room. Nicole was still hugging her. Owen was crying.

  She should tell him. She was in thrall with him. But he wasn’t a Cathers witch.

  “I—I had a bad dream,” she said, holding tightly to Nicole. Tommy took her hand—the same one a ghostly hand had squeezed—and pulled her against his chest. As she loosened her grip on her twin, she thought she heard the eerie singing…coming from Owen, who was still crying.

  Am I losing my mind?

  Mumbai: Philippe, Anne-Louise, and Eli

  Eli had tracked the magic emanations to a huge park. Now he stared in disbelief at the two witches. He had no idea who the woman was, but the man was the European witch Nicole was in thrall to.

  The bastard.

  “No freakin’ way,” he grunted.

  They were twenty feet apart, plenty close enough that Eli could kill him with magic, not close enough to kill him with his bare hands. He growled low in his throat, clenching and unclenching his fists. From the look on the witch’s face, Eli was pretty sure he was thinking something similar.

  The woman stepped forward, and with a flick of his wrist Eli sent her flying. She landed in a heap on a pile of rocks close to the lake.

  “You are Eli Deveraux,” the witch said.

  “In the flesh.”

  “I am Philippe. Nicole is in thrall to me.”

  “I guessed that much. Tell me where she is.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Tell me, damn you!” Eli threw a fireball at his head.

  Philippe reached up and plucked it out of the air, extinguishing it with his fingers. So. The jerk had some magic skills.

  “Why are you looking for her?” Philippe asked.

  As an answer Eli threw another fireball. “Just tell me.”

  This time Philippe not only blocked it, but sent it back to Eli.

  Oh, yeah, this is going to be a long fight, Eli thought.

  He dropped to the ground and sent a hailstorm of fire Philippe’s way. The witch deflected the wall of flame to his right, where it set a tree on fire.

  “If you kill me, you’ll never find her,” Philippe yelled, sending bolts of electricity flying at Eli’s head.

  “You can’t keep me from her…or my kid,” Eli shouted, spinning out of the way as he tore a crack in the ground beneath Philippe’s feet.

  Philippe tottered wide-legged for a moment before jumping away, dropping to his knees, and throwing a small cyclone into Eli’s chest.

  Eli grunted as the force made impact; he heard ribs cracking and rattled off an incantation to dull the pain.

  “You didn’t honestly think it was your baby,” Eli taunted.

  The French witch swore in French, probably damning Eli to hell. Not yet, he thought.

  He could taste blood on his lips. Not good. Had he punctured a lung? He twisted the cyclone up tighter and sent it back to Philippe, who deflected it back to the burning tree. The wind spread the fire, and suddenly not one but a dozen trees burst into flame.

  “The child might not be mine, but neither is he yours,” Philippe said.

  It was the truth that Eli was afraid of, and he could tell it cost the other man to say it out loud. And suddenly Eli wanted very, very much to break every bone in the witch’s body.

  With a roar he crossed the distance between them. He slammed into Philippe and they both went down in a tangle of arms and legs. Philippe regained his footing first and staggered away, trying to put space between them. Eli made it back to his feet and closed the distance again. He grabbed Philippe around the throat and started squeezing.

  Philippe exploded a fireball in Eli’s eyes; he went blind, but he held on, knowing it would pass. Philippe staggered backward, and Eli went with him. As they grappled, Philippe’s hands found Eli’s throat and he could feel the breath being squeezed out of him.

  “The water,” he heard Philippe wheeze. Eli’s vision cleared just enough to show him that they were on a ledge above a vast lake covered with water lilies. And then he heard Philippe in his mind.

  Those who are loved by a Cahors witch are cursed to die by drowning.

  Eli grinned wickedly at Philippe, remembering the bad old days when suspected witches were tied to stools and dunked to determine their innocence. Witches and water had a long, unhappy history. And to lay a curse of water on top of that…

  The odds were decidedly in a warlock’s favor.

  So, which one of us does she love? I guess there’s only one way to find out, Eli thought.

  Anne-Louise sat up with a groan. Whatever Eli had thrown at her had sliced through her personal wards as if they were tissue paper. She struggled to her feet; pain shot through her left arm, and she guessed that it was broken.

  Trees were blazing. Sharp winds cut through the smoke, and as she staggered forward, she saw neither Philippe nor Eli.

  “Philippe?” she called, breathing a pra
yer to the Goddess for his safety.

  There was no answer, but a moment later she heard an angry shout. She spun around and saw Eli and Philippe, their hands locked around each other’s throats, teetering on the rock ledge above one of the lakes.

  “No!” she screamed, and ran toward them.

  Philippe turned, gave her a ghost of a smile, and then the two of them went over the side and tumbled into the waters below. Anne-Louise ran to the edge and tried to conjure a spell that would lift them out of the water.

  Nothing happened. She strained her eyes but could see nothing beneath the surface. She considered jumping in after them, but that seemed like folly. She stood for several minutes, eyes probing the surface of the lake.

  Nothing.

  They were both gone.

  France, Thirteenth Century: Sasha

  Sasha had been trapped in the past for nearly a year. She had been forced to watch, helpless, as history repeated itself. Jean and Isabeau married. The Cahors attacked the Deveraux and the lovers died. All she could do was watch and try to stay alive.

  She had studied the origin of the blood feud between the two families ever since she had left her husband, Michael Deveraux, and found sanctuary in the Mother Coven. Living through the storied events, though, she had come to discover something very important.

  The deaths of Jean and Isabeau did not herald the start of the blood feud. Indeed, Cahors and Deveraux history went back much, much further. At one point they had been very closely allied. Then something, she still didn’t know what, had happened that had driven the families apart forever.

  The other thing that she had learned was that Jean’s lover, Karienne, had been pregnant with his child when she was sent away. Sasha had no idea if the child was male or female or whether there were more offspring that carried Deveraux blood without the Deveraux name.

  One other thing she had discovered was fascinating. There were two types of magic practitioners—“natural born” and “borrowers.” Natural born witches and warlocks inherited their power from their parents. It ran in the blood. Those who were borrowers had no natural talent, and only came to the practice later in life through close contact with a practitioner. She was still trying to figure out how it all worked, but as near as she could tell, the borrower’s magic came not from within but from the one they were close to. Which meant that she, Sasha, was a borrower. She had known nothing of witchcraft when she’d met Michael Deveraux, and in all her study since then she had never found a single witch or warlock in her family tree. So, whatever power she had was courtesy of Michael.

  She desperately wanted to return to her own time. She spent many sleepless nights wondering how her sons were and whether their father was dead. She began to think that there might be a way for her to use her borrowed magic against Michael. Maybe she could set up some sort of feedback loop that would destroy him, or at the very least render him powerless.

  More pressing than that question, though, was the one regarding how she could make it home. Time travel was not a skill possessed by ordinary witches and warlocks, although she had heard vague rumors that a handful had mastered it. A piece of a manuscript she had found in a monastery had led her to think that a combination of magic and science could get her home. She had even discovered a man who might be able to help her. Unfortunately, he was dead.

  So she had traveled to India looking for something that the Persian scientist and scholar Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī might have left there almost two hundred years earlier. The trip was dangerous, but not half so much as staying in the Deveraux-Cahors war zone.

  The area she was searching was under Hindu rule and in her own time was known as Bombay, or the more contemporary Mumbai. The fragment of text she had found had said that just as the phases of the moon could be charted, so could they be changed. Since it was unlikely that the scientist had believed man capable of affecting the moon in such a way, she thought it could mean that man could affect time.

  She had about convinced herself she was crazy, when another line of the text had stated that by so doing a man could walk with his ancestors and see beyond his years.

  Now, as she stood in a large field outside of the village, she wondered if she was crazy or if Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī had been, or both. She had known his name before finding it on the piece of parchment. She had studied him in college, and later as a witch had been fascinated by his illustration for the different phases of the moon.

  The text had led her to the field near the village, but it had given no more specific insight for finding the object that he had said he’d buried.

  “From unseen to seen from earth to sky, give me the eyes to seek what he did hide.”

  A small patch of earth off to her right suddenly zoomed into focus. She dropped to her knees and began to dig, and an hour later she struck something metal. The object glinted dully as she brushed the earth from it and gently pulled it free from its resting place.

  It was a crude circle around which the moon appeared in its various phases. She touched one with her finger and they all began spinning slowly counterclockwise. She felt a crackle of magic along her skin…and then…it was morning.

  She blinked, not entirely sure what had happened. For a moment she wondered if she had fallen asleep, but then she glanced around her and realized that the earth looked exactly as it had earlier that day before she had dug the object up.

  She stepped to the side and then spun the moons counterclockwise with more force. Around her the world seemed to change. There were flashes of light and dark that were almost like a strobe light. Each time the light appeared, she saw something different. The place where she had recovered the device was overgrown with flowers. Around her, trees were shrinking in size and number.

  And then something prompted her to reach out and stop the spinning of the miniature moons. Everything slowed for a moment, and then sitting beside her was a man.

  Sasha jumped, startled, but he looked at her with kindly eyes that sparkled with humor. “I have been waiting for you,” he said in Latin.

  “Are you Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī?” she asked.

  He inclined his head. “I am.”

  She showed him the device. “Did you create this?”

  “No. It was given to me by a very old and wise man. I was told to hold it and keep it safe for a great lady.”

  “Who?” she asked, still trying to get her bearings.

  “I can only assume he meant you.”

  “How does it work?” she asked.

  “I have spent many years studying it, and I do not know. However, I do know that if you hold your purpose in your mind, it will help you know when to stop the moons from spinning.”

  “That must be how I found you,” she said. “But what if I want to go forward in time?”

  “Then you must spin the moons the other way. The science or magic or whatever it is that controls it is beyond my comprehension. Fortunately, it is not so much of a mystery as to how to make it work.”

  “Who is the man who gave it to you?” Sasha asked.

  “He refused to tell me his name. I know only that he was a religious man, a follower of Zoroaster. He also told me that even though you can change your moons, you must act quickly if you are to save them.”

  “Save who?” Sasha asked, heart in her throat.

  “Again, he did not say. He was a man of very few words.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome.” He stood. “Now that I have fulfilled my promise to him, I will return home. I believe you will wish to do the same. Go with Allah.”

  She rose and bowed to him. She watched him walk away, and then turned her attention back to the object she held. She was ready to go home. She took a deep breath and spun the planets clockwise.

  Around her the world changed, and a city replaced the village. Then, suddenly, she was underwater, but whatever magic or science was working the object kept her safe and dry in a protective bubble.

  With a gasp she stopped the moons.
There in the water above her was her son, Eli, and the witch, Philippe. They were struggling together but a moment later separated. Each tried to swim toward the surface, but it was as though they could not. They were drowning.

  London: Kari, Hecate, and Osiris

  Somehow, everyone treated her more nicely if they thought she was deaf. Or maybe Hecate was working her magic. Kari got upgraded to first class on her flight from Seattle to Heathrow Airport in London. At Heathrow she was reunited with her “parcel,” and was amazed to discover that the baggage handlers hadn’t bothered to open it. After trundling it on a baggage trolley to a dark corner with Hecate riding in her carrying case, Kari found Osiris calm and awake. She wondered what dead cats dreamed of.

  It was a simple thing to rent her car, which was a white Vauxhall Corsa, and put her meager overnight bag, carrying toiletries and her two other changes of clothes, into the trunk—the boot—and let the two cats roam inside the car as they pleased. Both of them settled on the seat beside her. Hecate stared hard at her as they pulled out of the rental lot.

  I will guide you. It will take at least six hours.

  “Tired,” Kari protested.

  Inner Ring East.

  Kari sighed and started on her way, just as the skies opened up and rain began to pour down in buckets. She felt a frisson—would floods and fires follow her too?

  I want out of all of it. Out, Kari thought.

  Berlin: Jer and Eve

  Jer groaned in his sleep, waking Eve. She flipped onto her side to look at him. They were in a small bed-and-breakfast in Berlin that they had found just before nightfall. She wondered what he dreamed about. She also wondered how much longer she could keep up the charade. A dozen times already she had nearly told him the truth.

  They needed to find Eli. The Supreme Coven was willing to welcome the Deveraux with open arms. When the day came that Eli and Jer returned and took their place at the head of the organization, everything would change.

  She had served a very long time as Sir William’s attack dog. She didn’t mind killing, but even she was growing tired of the constant battle for survival. She had always known that sooner or later Sir William would turn on her, just as he did with all his other pets. Now that he was gone, though, there was a chance for change. That was, of course, if he was really gone.