At last, I found my way to the spot where I had seen the shining object the last time I was here. Ruth Anne and Merry joined me while Eve guarded the door, worried perhaps that it would shut and lock us in. We sifted through pictures, newspaper clippings, and small pieces of furniture, tossing them all aside even as nostalgia did its best to lure us in.
“Merry, you sense anything?” I asked, sifting through a bin of costume jewelry.
She put her hands to her temples. “This room has too much energy from too many people. It’s actually making me sick.”
“I guess I was wrong,” I said. Maybe the wand really was lost.
“I’m sorry, Maggie.” Merry stumbled over a trunk to stand beside me. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Well, lookie here,” Ruth Anne said, pulling on a stick half-buried beneath a carton of photo albums. She bent over, tugging at it, as if she was trying to pull a stubborn weed from a garden.
At last, it gave, sending her tripping over the box behind her.
She lifted the stick as our mouths dropped open. It was thin and sleek, pale yellow in color, with an emerald gem attached at the end. Ruth Anne waved it and a soft, green glow illuminated the room.
“It looks just like the wand in the book,” Merry said.
“Only more beautiful,” I added.
“Let’s get this done,” Eve said, holding the door open as we stumbled to the entrance. “Before it’s too late.”
Eighteen
MAN IN THE BOX
There are nights when you question just about everything: who you are, where you've come from, what your purpose is, how you got to your current place in life.
And then there are nights when you just accept things.
Nights when you stand beneath a silver moon, digging a shallow grave for a man you murdered. A man who probably had a wife and children, a mother and a job. A man who probably wouldn't have tried to molest your kid sister, if she hadn't been wearing a perfume enchanted to entice men in the first place.
These are the nights you try not to think.
Because if you think––about the corpse sitting in the car a dozen feet away, about your inability to determine wrong from right, about the fact that your mother was right about you after all, that you walk the line, just like your father––you just might go mad.
And I couldn't go mad.
Anyway, it was Thanksgiving, officially, and I wasn't going to let this little incident ruin the holidays.
“No!” I said aloud as I plunged my shovel into the earth and tossed out another spade full of dirt. “I’m going to keep it together!”
“Maggie, you okay?” Merry stopped digging and faced me, her eyes concerned. In this lighting, as her gold hair framed her sweet face, she looked more angelic than ever. “You can take a break, if you need to. We’ll be okay.”
“Me? I’m fine, Merry. Thanks for asking.”
I caught my sisters shooting each other knowing looks, looks that said I wasn’t all right, that in fact I had lost my marbles.
“I’m fine,” I repeated emphatically, tossing out an extra-large helping of dirt and wondering how much deeper we would need to dig.
The spell said to encase the subject in a box, then bury him under the light of a waning moon, but it didn't specify how deep the grave needed to be. An unhelpful omission. Since the “subject” would eventually dig his way out of that grave, clawing his way through the box and layers of muck, I conjectured we shouldn't dig it too deeply.
The experience would be traumatic enough for the poor guy as it was.
Fortunately for us, however, the timing of his death couldn't have been better, being a waning moon and all. If I’ve learned anything from this ordeal, it’s that if you are going to commit murder, and have any intention of bringing the deceased back to life, always plan it around the correct moon cycle.
Lucky break for Maggie!
“I think,” I said, continuing to dig. “That this might be a lucrative business. Bringing people back from the dead. If it works out, we might start charging for it. Gotta bring in more money than that stupid magick store does.”
“Maggie, stop,” Eve said, wiping her forehead with cashmere gloves she would never wear again.
“I’m just saying…why not? We can call it Bodies R Us. They’re not dead unless we say they’re dead.” I grinned at Ruth Anne, sure she’d appreciate my joke.
She shook her head and continued digging.
“What?” I asked, throwing my shovel onto the ground. “Are we too good for death jokes now?”
Merry pressed her lips together. “Honey, you’ve had a terrible shock and now it’s finally setting in. Go sit on the porch steps and we’ll finish this. We’ll call you when it’s done.”
“No!” I screamed, surprising myself with the shrillness of my voice. I tore at the air with both hands, as if being assaulted by an invisible man, tears stinging my eyes. “I won’t sit by while my sisters bury the man I…”
I choked, unable to finish the sentence. I lifted my trembling chin. “Neither hell nor jail is good enough for me.”
Someone’s arms wrap around me. I recognized the vanilla and lavender scent as Merry’s. I hyperventilated in her arms as she held me, cooing me to quiet.
“It’s okay, honey. It will be okay.”
How could I explain to her that it wouldn't be okay? Nothing might ever be okay again. Even if we did manage to raise him, I had the deathtouch, just like my father. And there was no coming back from that.
“What if we can’t do it, Merry?” I sniffed, wiping my nose on her shoulder as I stared at the Christmas tree in the front yard, the box that would soon be a coffin.
“We will,” she said, brushing the hair from my face. “You’ll see.”
“I think this is deep enough,” Ruth Anne announced, tossing her shovel onto the ground. “We’d better hurry.”
I let out one final sob of self-pity and nodded.
Merry grabbed my hand and we converged on the car.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the man in the passenger seat.
He sat buckled in, staring straight ahead. I removed his seat belt, noticing the stiffness of his body we hefted him from the car. You hear that the dead are cold, but you can never imagine how cold. It’s not a freezer type of cold or a snow type of cold. It’s an empty chill, like floating in deep space. A coldness without hope.
“We don’t have much time,” I said as we lowered him into the box.
He didn’t quite fit and we pushed on arms and legs, stuffing him inside like an unwilling Jack-in-the box.
Merry wiped the salve she had concocted across his face and neck. It smelled horrible, like ashes and mold. Next, she reached into her pocket and produced Mother’s wand.
“Once he’s completely buried, we use this,” she said.
“Paul says that in the old days, people were often buried alive,” Eve said, fighting back a shiver. “He said gravediggers found coffins with scratch marks on the inside.”
“Maybe they weren't buried alive,” I suggested. “Maybe they were guinea pigs in spells like this one.”
“Maggie, you’re not funny.”
“I know.”
At last, it was done. The man who’d been buying us drinks and pawing at my sister only a few hours ago was now four feet underground in my front yard. I wanted to stick a cross in the earth, or a stone, something to mark this place.
But I couldn't think like that. I had to believe he was just sleeping and would wake up shortly, and we’d all go back to our normal lives.
Merry lifted the wand. The emerald-colored gem shone so dim, it faded into the night. The wand was dying, too.
“We could use this on Mama,” Merry said, her voice almost a whisper.
There was a cold silence that passed between us. If the wand had one charge left, did we waste it on a stranger? Or did we try and save the woman we loved, who hovered very near death herself in the bedroom upstairs? It could buy her time.
Our heads turned in unison towards her window.
“No,” I said, resolutely. “There’s still hope for Mother, but there’s no hope for this guy. We have to use it on him.”
Merry nodded and we gathered around the grave. She lifted her wrist, ready to cast the wand, but I stopped her.
“Give it to me, Merry. I have to be the one.”
“But Maggie,” Merry protested. I knew what she was thinking. She had the gift of healing, while I had the curse of…
She handed it over.
My hand shook as I took it. Merry might have the right kind of magick, but my powers were greater, and I had Mother’s Circle.
My sisters held hands, chanting words from Mother’s scroll, indecipherable gibberish that produced an ethereal sound when spoken together, like angels falling from heaven.
I raised the wand, catching site of a raven that roosted between the spokes of the old garden gate, intently watching me.
It was now or never.
The price of the deathtouch had to be paid.
PART II
Nineteen
EVERLONG
Dark Root, Oregon
Sister House: The Front Yard
Time: The Witching Hour
“You’re a dream walker.”
“Yes.”
Shane stood before me, dressed in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt. Downy brown curls cut across his forehead, framing his storm-gray eyes and his strong brow. He noticed my appraisal and waved his hand. His shirt was suddenly gone.
“This better?” He smiled crookedly, inching closer to me.
I held my breath as he stepped through the fog, stopping so close I could feel his breath on my neck. He leaned in, tilting my chin back with his fingers, grazing my neck with his lips.
“Why are you here?” I asked, confused. He wasn’t supposed to be here. “It’s not safe.”
I pulled away from him and looked around. We stood in the front yard of Sister House. The ground was moist beneath my feet, the sky starless and without light. We were all alone.
“Why not?”
“I…I’m not sure.” I had secrets, many secrets. I closed my eyes trying to bring them up. Pictures of a baby, a pool table and a Cadillac danced in my head.
Then my brain settled on an image: a blond woman in a black robe.
My face reddened. A thin string of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a clap of thunder.
“That woman…”
Shane shook my shoulders. “Do you really take me for that kind of man, Maggie?”
“Then what was it?”
He looked to the side, finding the raven that still perched between the spokes of the iron gate. “I can’t say. But you need to trust me.”
“I don’t trust in anything anymore,” I said, even as I tilted my head back, giving him access to my neck and shoulders. His lips grazed my skin, nibbling and kissing their way down to the hollow between my breasts.
“You have secrets of your own,” he whispered, his nails digging into my shoulders. “Tell me your secrets, Maggie.”
Secrets. Yes. So many secrets.
“Tell me,” he said, pushing me against something solid. We were back in our grove, at our tree. I reached back, searching for the carved heart. I found it and pushed my fingers inside its rough grooves.
“Tell me,” he repeated, pressing his full weight against me. He raised my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes. “Tell me your secrets, Maggie.”
“I…I can’t. Not yet.”
Shane pressed his mouth over mine, pinning me to the tree while his hands roamed my body freely.
“God, Shane,” I said, as he nibbled my lips and my chin between rough, hot kisses. He rolled down the elastic waist of my skirt, exposing my hip.
“I could find out if I wanted to,” he said. “I could watch you during the daytime, and I could come to you at night. I could follow your every move, Maggie. Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” I said, lifting one leg and wrapping it around the top of his thighs, folding him into me. “No. I mean, no.”
He pulled back, his eyes resting on the pendant around my neck. He reached for it, clamping the crystal in his fist.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, lowering his brow as he tightened his grip on the pendant. “I could rip this from you, if I thought it would make you forget all about your precious Michael.”
“Shane…stop.”
“But that’s not your only link to him, is it? I sense him all over you.”
He released the necklace and it thudded heavily against my chest.
“I’m jealous, Maggie. So very, very jealous. Jealous that he has you in a way I never will.” He pulled me by the waist, his tongue plunging into my mouth. I could taste the salt on his lips, the hunger on his breath. “I’ll stop if you want me to,” he said, running his hands up the small of my back. “Say the word and I stop.”
But I didn’t want him to stop. In our dreams he could do anything. And in our dreams, I would let him.
“Maggie.” One hand moved to my breast, squeezing it gently. The other hand moved to the side of my face, lifting my lips to his. “Oh, Maggie…”
Dark Root, Oregon
Sister House,
6:22 AM
Thanksgiving Day, 2013
“Ma-geeee?”
“Yes, that’s good. You’re doing great.”
“Magggg-eee.”
“Yes! Try one more time.”
“Mag-ee!”
“Perfect!”
“Yeah, he’s a regular boy genius.”
“Don’t listen to Eve. You’re doing wonderful!”
“A zombie savant.”
“Now, Eve. Don’t call him that. He has feelings.”
“Are you sure?”
“Owweee.”
“Stop poking him! Don’t worry, Leo. Merry will protect you.”
“Shut up, you two. I think she’s waking up.”
“Maggie? Maggie?”
I blinked against the light that was being shone in my face, trying to force my eyelids fully open. Four faces stared down at me. My sisters and…
I sat upright, screaming.
“Shh.” A hand cupped my mouth and I recognized Merry’s voice. “You’ll scare him.”
I struggled against Merry’s hand, taking deep breaths through my nose. When Merry was sure I wasn't going to scream again, she released me and helped me stand. Two heavy blankets dropped to the ground. We were still outside Sister House, but it was morning, so early that the sun was only half-visible on the horizon.
Eve retrieved one of the blankets and wrapped it around my shoulders. My sisters smiled at me, seemingly in good spirits. Leo lifted a pudgy finger, pushing it into my shoulder so hard I almost fell backwards.
I recoiled in horror.
“Mag-gee!” he said, a slack-jawed grin on his simple face.
“We did it?” I asked in disbelief as I avoided his next thrust. The back of my head throbbed where I had hit the ground.
“Apparently.” Ruth Anne removed her glasses and wiped them with her grimy X-Files T-shirt that read I Want to Believe. “You know, I’ve never actually heard of a successful resurrection, biblical references aside.”
“If you can call this successful,” Eve said.
Leo had scooped up a handful of rocks and was shoving them in his mouth.
“How long was I out?” I asked. “It felt like days.”
Ruth Anne checked her phone. “About four hours. You hit the ground pretty hard. Had us scared for awhile, but when you started talking about Shane we knew you were going to be okay.” She smirked. “I hope it was a good dream?”
I blushed at the memory, feeling very exposed.
“Hey,” Ruth Anne said. “Don’t sweat it. There are more important things to worry about right now.”
“I still can’t believe…” I said, unable to finish the sentence.
I looked Leo fully over for the first time.
The entire scene was surreal.
“I’m tired and hungry,” I said, giving in to my baser needs, the only things that made sense anymore.
“You and me both,” said Ruth Anne.
“Stop that!” Merry ran after Leo as he tried to catch a bird.
He wasn’t sly about it, but ran after it with his arms flared wide and with all the zest and enthusiasm of a preschooler. He didn’t catch any of the birds, but this didn’t dampen his spirits as he took off soaring towards the next group of starlings he saw.
“Maybe he never really died?” I suggested to Ruth Anne.
He was twice the size of Merry, but easily out-dodged her.
“…Maybe he suffered brain damage when his head hit the wall?” I said.
“Two hours without a pulse? That’s not just dead, Maggie, that’s dead-dead.”
“So…” I asked hesitantly, tugging at the side of my skirt. “What happened?”
“Let’s just say you should be glad you weren’t awake for it.”
“Tell me, please.”
I needed to hear it, for my own absolution. If I had killed him, I needed to hear all the grim details on how he had come back.
“There was dirt…lots and lots of dirt spewing up from the ground, like a volcano shooting magma. And the screams. You can’t imagine such horrible screams. A banshee’s screams would have sounded better. Merry tried to help, but I stopped her. It had to be all him for it to take.” Ruth Anne shook her head. “That’s all I will say. I can’t even write anything that horrible.”
Ruth Anne pulled her lips inside her mouth, taking a long pause, then cracked a smile.
“Luckily, Leo here took a shine to Merry as soon as he was free. She made it all better. Classic case of imprinting. He thinks Merry is his mommy.”
The Magick of Dark Root (Daughters of Dark Root) Page 18
