“Where are you going?” Beau called, holding the curtain open.
“You’re not going to help me.”
“But I am.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“If you only knew, doll. If you only knew.” He waved for me to follow him into the back and let the curtain fall.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The back room of Wolfsbane and Absinthe was dark and had aisles created between rows of industrial shelving filled with boxes and small crates. There were two dark doors to the right, both shut. My tongue seemed immediately coated with dust—before I even opened my mouth.
“Marco,” I said softly.
“Polo,” Beau shot back.
I caught sight of him then, like a shadow, moving down the left row, and followed.
“Help me.” He leaned his cane against the back wall and started lugging a crate from the bottom shelf into the pathway. “The lid.” Together we hefted the wooden lid up, but when my hand slipped and touched his, Beau recoiled and lost his grip. The lid crashed down on his foot. He didn’t so much as move his foot, he just wiggled his fingers and then made and unmade a fist as if I’d shocked him.
“Beau . . . are you okay?”
“Yes, hell, just don’t touch me.”
“I didn’t mean to.” The memory of his reaction to my handshake hadn’t left me.
“Is your foot okay?”
“Yes, why?”
“The lid hit your foot. Hard.”
“Did it?” He shook his hand in my direction as if waving me off. “Prosthetic. Don’t worry about it.”
He had a fake leg. No wonder he used a cane and walked stiffly.
He dug around in the crate. Packing peanuts cascaded over the edge. “Here it is.” More packing peanuts rained to the floor as he lifted out an antique jewelry box. He opened its glass door, pulled on a drawer within, and removed a key. He offered it to me. “Hold this.” He replaced the jewelry box as he’d found it then relieved me of the key. “Pick up those peanuts, will you?”
What was I supposed to say? He was old and had a prosthetic leg.
When I’d scooped up the peanuts and replaced them, I hefted the lid into place.
“Missed a few,” Beau said.
He was right. Several had hidden between the lid and the crate. So, when I was certain I’d gotten every last piece of the crackly foam stuffed inside where it belonged, I dropped the lid shut and proceeded to shove the crate back under the shelving by myself. It wasn’t easy and he didn’t offer to help.
Smacking my hands together jarred most of the dust from them and, hopefully, it indicated “job done,” too. “What’s the key to?”
“This way.”
We revisited the public portion of the store. Beau opened a case and flipped up the felt liner on the bottommost shelf, revealing a lock. He inserted the key, lifted the shelf up, and pulled out what could only be described as a wooden briefcase. Punching the register, he dropped the key into the drawer and shut the register again. “In the office.”
I hoped this rigmarole would be over soon.
He twisted the knob on the closer of the two doors, yanked the string hanging from the overhead lamp, and a murky forty watts did little more than illuminate the dust floating in the air.
Beau put the briefcase on the desk. I studied the item before us. The hinges were rusting, and the wood had a nice patina to it. Then Beau reached into his pants pocket. He brought out a key ring that any janitor would have been proud to carry. There were at least forty locks in this world that Beau could open. Planting my backside on the rusty metal folding chair across from the desk, I hoped he knew which one he needed.
After the first three keys didn’t unlock it, he confided in me that he hadn’t opened this briefcase in over ten years, and that he’d completely forgotten about it until I’d brought up protecting myself. Beau hadn’t struck me as the absentminded type, but as the seconds relentlessly ticked by, I found myself willing to reconsider.
Three full minutes later, I heard the lock click and Beau mumbled, “Of course that’s the one.”
He spun the case a quarter turn, then opened it. I expected both sides to lie flat on his desk and reveal two traylike halves, but my guess was wrong. This “briefcase” opened flat, but more like a pop-up book. Fragile paper of brilliant colors created a scene of unicorns, griffons, phoenixes, and dragons.
Beau rotated the base slowly so I could see every side.
I had never seen such a beautiful pop-up piece of art. In the center, four larger images of the legendary creatures stood posed as if they were on family crests, each supporting a portion of paper that created an origamilike cube. I realized from the colors and art that each beast stood for one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
“Do you like it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. I knew of various symbols used by witches to represent the four elements, but never have I seen these creatures used as such.”
“They are more than representations. They are earth incarnate, air incarnate, fire incarnate, and water incarnate.”
I shook my head, disagreeing with him. “Elementals are spirits.”
“Why?” Beau challenged. “Because that’s all you’ve ever known them to be?”
“Yes.”
He harrumphed. “The spirit of an element is an elemental, and elementals are embodied in the flesh in these creatures. Haven’t you talked to the vampire who sent you here about this?”
“No.”
His surprise was genuine, but faded quickly. He grumbled, “Of course he leaves it to me to tell you. Bastard.”
“Tell me what?”
He gestured at the pop-up. “That’s what all this is about.”
I knew he didn’t mean the art itself.
“The fairies really came here for one reason: to steal this world’s elementals. They’d destroyed their own. That’s why they made the deal with Menessos and his buddies way back when. Fast-forward a few thousand years; the fairies are sick and tired of being at the witches’ beck and call. They offer up elementals to guard the magic circles. WEC agreed.” He shook his head. “He was behind the Concordat, too, I’m sure of it.” He paused. “The elementals are there, in the fairy world. So long as the door’s open, witches can still access the elementals—like your spirit in astral travel is just a spirit and not your body, so is the spirit of these elementals when they guard your circle here, from afar.”
I wasn’t sure I believed this. “Unicorns, dragons, griffons, and phoenixes were all really real and were of this world?” And Beau knew Menessos’s secret, too. Maybe not the part about being alive, but he knew enough.
“Once upon a time.” His smug look grew more self-satisfied as he added, “That’s how we know of them, but what we know is all screwed up. They’re gone so there’s no proof except what people used to know, data passed from person to embellishing person over millennia.”
“That’s fascinating, Beau.” But what’s this got to do with protecting me from being Bindspoken? I plastered on my politest expression. “Did you make this?”
“No. But it’s been in my family for generations.” His voice quavered just a bit at the word “family.”
“You okay?”
He nodded, studying the paper spectacle between us.
It was an opportunity, so I asked, “Why does my touch hurt you?”
“You’re a witch.”
“And you run a witch’s supply shop. You are a witch, too, aren’t you?”
His whole face seemed to harden into stone. “Not anymore.”
Sweet Goddess. “You’re Bindspoken?”
“Going on sixteen years.”
No words came to mind other than “how” and “why,” but neither of those were any of my business.
“I keep the shop just to piss the wrinkly old bitches off.”
A laugh tumbled out. I couldn’t help it. It fit: crotchety old man with a cane, running a witchy shop wit
h a fake front man to basically give the finger to WEC.
“And helping you, doll, will gall them even more.”
“So you will help?”
“This ain’t no tea-party centerpiece.” He indicated the paper between us, then placed his elbows on the desktop and leaned into the display, his stony eyes sparkling. “And you’re going to owe me for helping you.”
“What do you want?”
“Before the next full moon, you come back here and we’ll discuss it then.”
“I won’t commit to anything—”
“You don’t have a choice if you want to avoid what WEC is planning for you.”
Couldn’t say I liked having my nose rubbed in it.
“And I don’t have a choice, either,” he admitted. “I have to help you. If you’re Bindspoken you can’t help me. Reach into the paper box at the top,” Beau said. “Take what’s inside.”
Only one side of the box was attached. My fingers delved gingerly inside, brushed something.
A flare of heat rocked me, and I withdrew. It wasn’t sensual heat like Menessos sought to enflame me with. This was like what Nana had described as a menopausal hot flash. I wasn’t touching the stone anymore but the reaction continued, heat growing, spiking, rolling up and down my body. Sweat beaded on my upper lip. “Whoa.”
“What is it?” Beau asked.
“It’s hot.”
He laughed out loud and slapped his thigh. “It likes you.”
“Likes me?”
“That’s how it used to greet me. It’s had a long time to be alone, I thought it might have lost some zing, but apparently not.”
“Some ‘zing,’ you say?”
“Just take hold of it. It’ll calm down.”
I wasn’t convinced. My expression told him so.
“If it didn’t like you, you would have felt nothing.”
I reached in again, more determinedly. What I came up with was a dazzling pendant the size of a Reese’s Cup, but if it had been chocolate, it would have melted in my hot palm immediately. “Fluorite?”
Beau nodded. “From before it had such a name.”
I knew that fluorite was considered a “newer” stone in the witching community. I had heard of a farmer who acquired some previously untilled acres south of my land, and when he tried, the plow kept hitting stone. He’d realized why it had been previously untilled, and had been angry until word got around and “someone” pointed out that if he’d collect the large chunks, he could sell them to a rock dealer. He hadn’t known there were such folks as rock dealers. His gratitude culminated in my choice of the pieces; I had a large hunk of the raw stone’s pretty interlocking cubes on my bookshelf at home.
Harvesting the stones paid more than the crops he’d have sown that first season. And now he had prime fields.
The pendant’s thin, flat circular disc had a variety of pale colors: sea green, lavender, and ice blue. It was set into a ring of flames, the kind usually depicted around a symbolic sun, but these flames varied from gold to silver to copper to iron. Greetings, I thought to it and put my salutation into a pulse through my palm.
The temperature of the room, for me, returned to normal. “How do I use this?”
“Wear it, doll. Put it on a chain and wear it.”
“That’s it?”
He cocked his head. “Not ‘it’ as in that’s all. You know better than that. I’d say activate it, but I think your touch already awakened it to life.”
I heartily agreed. “What, exactly, is its purpose?”
“It is a talisman of power, an amulet against harm, and a charm of invisibility.”
Okaaay. “Invisibility is good. Hide me from WEC?”
“If someone tries to target you with magic, the magic will miss.”
“Could be dangerous for those around me?”
He nodded. “Could be dangerous if you’re hurt and someone’s trying to heal you with magic. It’ll miss, too.”
I studied the little pendant. “It’s quite pretty.”
“The fluorite represents both the face of the sun and the moon. The gold and copper rays are the sun, the silver and iron ones are for the moon.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it, with that duality.”
“Wait’ll you see what it does during an eclipse.”
I was going to have to check my almanac. “Beau, I want to be clear. Are you giving me this or am I borrowing it?”
“It’s a little thing the Lustrata ought to have about her neck, doll. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. There is, however, one more thing you must do.”
“I’m listening.”
“No charm is infallible, not even one as powerful as this. Any token can be removed from you. Though I’d hate to think the Lustrata might let that happen, if you’re wise you’ll do something more permanent.”
“Like what?”
“Displace a few pieces of your soul.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“What?” On my feet, I stared down at Beau, incredulous.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“N-not as bad as it sounds? Not as bad? What the hell, Beau? It’s—”
“It’s a binding ritual.”
“Fuck,” I whispered, plopping back into the metal chair. Noticing Beau’s questioning look, I added, “I’ve dealt with enough binding issues lately.” Sarcasm helped make my point. I thought.
Beau seemed unimpressed. “Suck it up, Lustrata.”
I sat straighter, took a deep breath, and readied to give him a speech he’d not soon forget.
He beat me to the punch line. “Do you want to fulfill . . . and survive . . . this destiny of yours, or not?”
My lungs deflated. “Of course.”
“Then you have to pay the price. It’s gotten worse with each incarnation. Each time the stakes are higher, and the enemy’s investment has grown stronger. If you fail, it will be worse for the next one.”
“How do you even know that?”
He gauged me steadily; I maintained an air of firm expectation. I wanted an answer. Finally he said, “I had cause to do an enormous amount of research.”
“What cause?”
“We’ll discuss that before the next full moon.”
I hated being inveigled. “You were researching the Lustrata?”
“I researched everything. I help you solve your problem, and you’ll help me solve mine. That’s fair, isn’t it? Balanced enough for you, O Bringer of Justice?”
I could do without the sarcasm and with a lot more information. “I’d like to know what you want me to do to help you.”
“For now, protect yourself. Don’t let them seal your magic in. Place a piece of your soul with someone else, and take a piece of someone else’s soul into you.”
“How do I do that?” I demanded. “And how does that help?”
“Menessos knows how. It’s in that old book of his.”
My breath caught. “Menessos sent me to you to find out how to do whatever it is I have to do. Wait—you know about—?”
“The Trivium Codex? Yes, I know of it. And he sent you to me so I could tell you what you didn’t want to hear or wouldn’t have believed if he told you. It’s all in the book.”
“You’re telling me to give a piece of my soul to the vampire?”
“No, I’m telling you to give up two pieces, and to receive two pieces.”
“I need to give him two pieces of—”
“No, give two people each one piece.”
I blinked.
“Catching on, doll? The trade-off must be done at one time—the three of you together. Convincing Johnny will be thorny at best.”
“Johnny’s a waerewolf. No magic.”
“Johnny’s Domn Lup, doll. He is magic.”
“What?” Magic? And how does he know Johnny’s Domn Lup?
“Those tattoos. Someone figured out what he was long ago. And whoever it was ha
d him tattooed as a . . .” He struggled for the right words. “It’s not so dissimilar from being Bindspoken.” He leaned back in the chair a moment. Closed his eyes. Opened them and spoke rapidly, as if he’d found what he wanted to say in some mental dictionary. “Instead of outside forces permanently hardening and sealing your aura to sever you from the energies of the universe as with Bindspeaking, this is more like convincing your magic to relinquish its power into the art and colors of the tattoos. It has the perk of being reversible. Johnny has to persuade the tattoo artist who locked the power up to unlock it.”
“You never told him this!”
Beau shrugged. “He can’t remember where he came from, let alone when or where the tattoos were given him, or by whom, so there’s no point in saying, ‘Hey, you’re powerful but someone kind of imprisoned you in your own skin,’ is there?” There was no remorse in his posture or expression. “I know what that’s like. It’s hell. Better he not know . . . until such time as his path crosses that of someone who can fix it. Like the Lustrata.”
“What have I got to do with this?”
“All he does know is that he was prepared for you. He told you that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You must give pieces of your soul to each of them,” Beau said. “And take a piece in return in order to maintain the soul balance within yourself. Then you can block WEC from Bindspeaking you. You can also unshackle what’s been imprisoned deep inside of Johnny, and—” He shut the briefcase and locked it. “Oh yeah, doll, you can save the world and yourself to boot.” He was smiling, but I knew this was no joke.
I just sat there, stunned by his words.
Beau stood. “Come on.” He limped through the door. Somehow I managed to stand and follow.
Out in the store, he busily rifled around the shelves. He selected a small, wide-mouthed bottle with clear liquid in it. Uncorking it, he added a peach pit. Scrutinizing the larger jars of herbs, he took down three. By their labels, they were willow, moss, and orchid. He took a pinch from the first two jars, and three dry petals from the orchid jar. After hurriedly replacing those jars, he chose another, took out three holly leaves, and placed them in a small box.
The bells on the door jingled.
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