As Tori and I pulled away from the house, she said, “Are you okay?”
I nodded, but there was a knot in my throat that made it hard to speak.
“I had no idea,” I finally managed to say.
“Me either,” she replied, looking out the window.
We drove in silence for a couple of miles, and then I asked, “What did Gemma say when you guys left the room?”
“That she’ll stay with your mom until your dad gets back,” Tori answered.
Which is exactly what I expected, but it was still good to hear.
“So,” I said, staring straight ahead at the road, “We talk to Myrtle?”
“Oh, hell yes,” Tori said. “One way or another, we’re getting the whole story this time.”
My sentiments exactly.
3
Nothing about that day went the way we thought it would. We got back to the store a little after dark because we stopped to have a bite to eat. We weren’t really hungry. That was just an excuse to recover from our conversation with the moms and to work up the nerve to speak with Myrtle.
Before we’d left to drive to Cotterville, Tori and I had debated about taking the time to unpack the boxes of supplies the UPS guy delivered the day before, but neither one of us was in the mood to get the job done. Since the boxes were gone, Darby must have tackled the chore for us.
Normally, when we came through the back door, he would have been waiting for us, but this time, the place was deserted. Then we saw the basement door standing ajar, casting a rectangle of light across the floor.
“Does that look like an invitation to you?” I asked Tori.
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Myrtle is a step ahead of us, as usual.”
“Two steps,” a woman’s voice called from the basement. “Please come down and join us.”
“Us?” I mouthed to Tori.
She shrugged, and gave me a silent, “Who knows?”
We did as we were told, and promptly got the surprise of our lives.
Myrtle was sitting in the “lair” under the stairs. The basement itself is filled with endless rows of industrial storage shelves four levels high. They extend as far as the eye can see, covering far more real estate than should be contained under the footprint of my store. Darby spends a great deal of time down there “cataloging” for Myrtle.
To be perfectly honest? I have no idea what the two of them are up to.
But in the corner under the stairs, Myrtle has created a workspace for us that looks like it belongs in an English manor house on some PBS show. The walls are covered in dark paneling, except for the space on either side of the fireplace. That’s dominated by floor-to-ceiling-bookcases holding elegant old leather-bound books.
An oak table fills the center of the area, which is carpeted in beautiful Oriental rugs. Typically there are two leather wingback chairs on either side of the fireplace, but we found three chairs holding three people--a brownie, and a rat.
I know. I know. The next line should be “walked into a bar.”
Frankly? A drink probably was in order, but no one had yet shared with me that Myrtle keeps a cabinet full of single malt beside the roll top desk.
There was a cheerful little blaze in the fireplace. The basement is always several degrees colder than the upper floor. But that’s not why an icy sensation went through my veins. Chase McGregor was sitting right there with Myrtle as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Darby was perched on the arm of his chair, and there was a third, older man whom I didn’t recognize. Rodney, our resident black-and-white domestic rat, was sleeping peacefully on the shoulder of Myrtle’s gray sweater.
When Myrtle chose to appear to us in human form, she picked the most stereotypical librarian look you can imagine, including a gray bun high on her head secured with a yellow No. 2 pencil. She was now regarding us kindly from behind the round, black spectacles she didn’t need, but which suited her new persona perfectly.
“Come sit with us,” she said, gesturing to two empty chairs that completed the loose circle and were obviously meant for Tori and me.
When I remained frozen in place, Chase said nervously, “Please, Jinx. I know this is a shock, but we’ll tell you everything if you’ll just sit down.”
He looked as sick to his stomach as I felt.
I looked at Myrtle, a note of accusation in my voice. “My mom called you, didn’t she?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Myrtle answered, unflappable as always. “It’s been years since I’ve heard from Kelly. I was surprised she even remembered how to reach me, but she wanted to give me time to prepare.”
“You mean to figure out how much you’re willing to tell me?” I asked, trying not to give over to my rising anger, but the words were unmistakably hostile.
Half-truths were bad enough, but if Chase was sitting there, had I even been getting quarter-truths?
Here I’d been turning myself inside out to make certain he never saw anything strange in the shop, only to discover he was one of the people hiding things . . . no, not hiding, lying.
I thought Chase was trustworthy. So trustworthy, in fact, that I’d been losing sleep trying to figure out the best way to come clean with him about being a witch. I felt like a complete fool.
The sharpness of my question didn’t phase Myrtle, who continued to regard me placidly. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “We have every intention of telling you the entire story. It is, however, rather a long tale. I think you’ll be more comfortable if you join us.”
Beside me, Tori said, in a low voice, “Come on, Jinksy. Hear them out.”
In the end, however, it was the pleading look on Chase’s face that finally made me move. Tori and I both sat down and I just looked at Myrtle. Waiting.
She sighed. “Very well then. I suppose your attitude is understandable. I’m afraid we have to start with a bit of a history lesson. Let me just say from the beginning that I am not beating around the proverbial bush. These facts are, what I believe is popularly referred to as, the ‘backstory.’”
And it did go a ways “back” all right. Four-hundred-and-ninety-eight years to be exact.
Myrtle started in 1517 with the Protestant Reformation.
I had a vague, high-school-history-class memory of the Martin Luther story. He wrote up a bunch of objections to things Pope Leo X was doing and nailed the piece of paper on a church door. That’s what passed for social media in the 16th century.
Basically, Luther’s manifesto, The 95 Theses, made every highly placed Catholic in the church's power structure lose their minds. What Myrtle had to tell us from there, however, qualified as “the rest of the story.”
In spite of my mood, I was fascinated.
For his day, Martin Luther really was a radical taking on the biggest “establishment” he could find. Luther objected to all kinds of things the Church in Rome was up to, and his ideas were dangerous in other ways.
Luther believed that the common people should be able to talk to God directly without a priest acting as a middleman, and he was an advocate of literacy. If people could read the Bible, they could make up their own minds about what the scriptures meant without waiting for the Pope to tell them.
Luther threatened the Church’s monopoly on belief and learning, and then he went after the papal pocketbook. The Church made a lot of money selling “indulgences.” Think of an indulgence as a holy hall pass. Wealthy sinners bought indulgences to knock a few years off the time they were likely to spend in purgatory after they died.
Purgatory is the place where folks who aren’t headed straight to hell get tormented for a while before they’re allowed to go to heaven. The bigger your sins, the longer the wait time. The Pope was making hefty cash selling his Get Out of Purgatory Free cards, but Luther called the whole business what it was, a scam.
That’s all in the history books. What most people don’t know is that at the same time Luther touched off the Protestant Reformation, there were simil
ar events going on in the Fae world.
“Fae” is a sort of catchall term for all the magical races. You sometimes see them . . . well, “us,” I guess . . . referred to as “The Folk,” but the heavy Scot-Irish influence in our part of the world explains why the words Tori and I learned that day were all Gaelic with some Latin thrown in.
We already knew that there are “hereditary” witches and “made” witches, but those terms were a simplification. As we listened, Myrtle broke down the magical social order for us. The two big divisions are Hereditarium Magicae and Creavit Magicae.
Witches occupy a special place in the Fae world, which I’ll help you understand in more or less the order it occurred to me to ask the question. That night, as I was listening to Myrtle talk, I honestly couldn’t even allow myself to entertain the idea that I might not be “human,” much less understand that my definition of what constitutes “humanity” needed some work. For now, let’s just take this all one step at a time.
Magic is inherent in all creation. Some beings are simply born with the ability to access it. Like all power, however, magic can be corrupted through an act of Proditor Magicae. Rough translation, “traitor magic.”
An Hereditarium practitioner agrees to commit Veneficus Trajectio, the “poison transfer,” to turn a mortal into a Creavit, a “created” or “made” witch. Generally, the mortal who seeks the transfer is looking to amass wealth, position, power, or all of the above, plus immortality. The one catch to the deal is that Creavit witches can’t bear children. Brenna Sinclair was a Creavit witch.
What no one in the mortal world knew was that Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation because he was under the spell of a Creavit witch. I mean seriously, let’s just look at Luther’s behavior. Then, the guy was considered a religious visionary. Today, he’d be handed a lifetime supply of the strongest antipsychotic on the market. Luther wrote theology sitting on the toilet and was known to fling his own . . . by-products . . . at visions of the devil.
The Creavit practitioners behind the Reformation were quietly working to gain control of the royal courts of Europe. To accomplish that goal, they needed to dilute papal power. Within Fae society, one Hereditarium practitioner, a wizard from England, Barnaby Shevington, raised a protest not unlike Luther’s objections to the Church of Rome.
According to Myrtle, the Ruling Elders governed the Fae in Europe. Shevington tried to oppose the rising power of the Creavit, saying they would never practice pure, natural magic because the stain of their mortal origins forever tainted them. The Creavit would, in his estimation, always use their powers for dark purposes.
Martin Luther was excommunicated for his troubles, and so was Barnaby Shevington. The Elders, whose numbers had been infiltrated by the Creavit, threatened him with the loss of his powers if he didn’t back off. Shevington came up with a solution the Elders didn’t anticipate. He founded a colony in the Americas.
In April 1584, Shevington and his Hereditarium followers sailed to the New World disguised as mortal settlers destined to build a colony on Chesapeake Bay on behalf of Sir Walter Raleigh. They arrived on Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on July 4, where they were left alone for three years. When somebody finally got around to checking on them, there was nothing left of the settlement but a single skeleton. No other trace of the vanished colonists remained.
To this day, the Roanoke Island venture is referred to as “The Lost Colony,” but they weren’t lost at all. Shevington waited until the English ships were out of sight to head for the mountains of the interior where he built the first Fae colony in the New World.
Just as the Puritan settlers of New England came to this country to practice religious freedom (which really meant religion their way), Shevington and his followers wanted magical freedom. They immediately outlawed Veneficius Trajectio and, over time, their colony became a sanctuary for New and Old World Fae alike.
Yes, the Americas have their own magical population.
Ever heard of a dude named Sasquatch?
Critter called the chupacabra?
And you thought that stuff was just an old X-Files script.
Yeah. Me, too. But not anymore.
Myrtle handled the narrative right up to the point where Shevington marched off into the wilderness. Then she turned to Chase. He had listened to the whole story with his gaze firmly fixed on the pattern in the Oriental rug under his feet.
When Myrtle said, “I think you should tell her about Clan McGregor now,” his head came up.
His eyes met mine and I felt an odd recognition. I had certainly looked into Chase’s eyes before, but there was something in his gaze now that touched me in a different way. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
“Well,” Chase began, “my ancestors came to the New World with Barnaby Shevington. You may have heard of our clan. Liam Neeson made a movie about one of my more illustrious kinsmen.”
I frowned. “Rob Roy?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but my branch of the family has been in this country since 1584, so we missed out on the Battle of Culloden in 1746.”
The expression on my face must have told him I had no idea what he was talking about, because he smiled and said, “It was a bad day for the Scots.”
When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “At any rate, the McGregors had a special mission in Shevington’s plans for the New World, a mission we continue to fulfill to this day. We’re . . . well . . . you see . . . we . . .”
Beside him the elderly man shifted restlessly in his chair and said tersely, “Oh, for God’s sake, son. If you won’t tell them, I will. The McGregors are werecats.”
At the same time, Tori and I both said, “Son?”
The old fellow chuckled. “That’s right. I’m Chase’s father, Festus McGregor.”
I stared at Chase. “You named your cat after your father?”
A slow blush spread over Chase’s tanned cheeks. “Not exactly.”
The old man said, “He didn’t name the cat after me. I am the cat.”
“Okay,” I said, pushing up out of my chair, “I don’t know what you all are up to, but I’ve had enough. This is just ridicu . . . ”
“Fine,” the old man grumbled. “I guess we have to play show and tell.”
He stood up, stretching a little and giving to one leg. Then he sort of . . . shimmered. It started at the top of his head and pushed him down toward the floor. His flannel shirt and jeans pooled in a heap on the rug.
At first I thought he had disappeared entirely, and then a yellow head poked up out of the neck of the shirt. The Festus I did know, a ginger tomcat, extricated himself from the pile of clothes and fixed me with an appraising stare.
Then, as if we hadn’t seen enough, he opened his mouth and said, very clearly, “Do you get it now?”
Puzzle pieces rocketed into place in my mind. I wheeled around and pointed an accusing finger at Chase.
“You!” I said. “You were the mountain lion at the waterfall and in the cemetery.”
This time Chase turned scarlet to the roots of his hair, but he didn’t look away. “Yes,” he said quietly, “that was me. It’s my job to protect you.”
His job?
So not the right thing to say.
4
Whatever Chase read in my expression, he knew instantly he was in dangerous waters. The backpedaling started immediately. “I meant it’s Clan McGregor’s job to guard The Valley,” he said hastily, “and the coven watching over Knasgowa’s grave, which includes you . . . now . . . so that’s why I used . . . why I said that . . .”
He trailed off miserably, fixing Myrtle with a mute appeal for help.
When she made no effort to jump in, Festus took pity on Chase and came to his son’s rescue.
“Sit down, Jinx,” the cat commanded, hobbling over to the hearth to get closer to the fire. “If you want to take your claws to my son when I'm done talking, no one will stop you.”
“Gee. Thanks,
Dad,” Chase muttered.
As I watched, Festus turned in three tight, counterclockwise circles before settling down.
“Why do cats do that?” I asked curiously.
“We’re not just cats,” Festus said archly. “We’re Scots. Three is a sacred number to Celtic peoples. It reflects the unity of mind, body, and spirit. McGregor cats turn three times to honor that belief.”
I didn’t fall off the bagpipe wagon yesterday. That just sounded too made up to believe.
“Okay. So why do non-Scottish cats do it then?” I countered.
Festus fixed me with an imperious glare. “Because they wish they were Scottish cats,” he deadpanned.
“Right.” I said sarcastically, “I’ll run that by the next Siamese I see and get back to you.”
Myrtle stifled a giggle and Chase got very interested in the toes of his boots again.
Tori, however, was so juiced that we were sitting there having a conversation with a cat, she simply could not repress her enthusiasm.
“This is just so awesome,” she said, in a tone of voice that sounded perilously close to gushing. “Why are you a house cat and Chase is a mountain lion?”
I wanted to know the answer to that one, too.
“Finally,” Festus groused, “an intelligent question. I am a house cat because I am retired. After I hurt my leg, I couldn’t patrol anymore. I can’t very well lounge in the sunlight on my bench as a mountain lion, now, can I?”
Hard point to argue.
Then it occurred to me how many times I’d sat on that bench with Festus scratching his ears.
I had scratched Chase’s father’s ears.
Oh. My. God.
Taking a deep breath, and trying to shove that thought as far out of my mind as possible, I made an effort to get back on track.
“You said it’s your job to guard a valley. What valley?”
“Shevington’s Valley,” Festus answered.
Why on earth would that valley need to be guarded, unless. . .
Witch at Last: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 3 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) Page 3
