Sarah pushed her grimoire out toward him. “If you’re so great, could you help me have a look at this? I need very particular information, but none of my questions are working. I’ve asked every sort of way I can think of.”
Mr. Etonne moved to the sales desk. Near the cash box, he plucked a crooked pair of spectacles in wiry frames, balancing them on the bridge of his nose. “Bring it over here, please. Let’s have a look.”
Sarah rushed with Edwin at her heels to the counter, cracking the book open wide to its blank pages. She watched the Shifter expectantly.
“Well go on,” he jutted his chin at her. “It doesn’t belong to me! I certainly can’t be the one asking it questions.”
Sarah peered over her shoulder at Edwin. “What did you say to me? In the alley? About the note?”
“Oh-oh! Yes. A-Abelim. Don’t remember m-m-much else….” Edwin scratched at the back of his head.
At once, Sarah leaned over the counter and the book, pressing up on the heels of her hands. “Grimoire…where can we find Abelim?”
Edwin rushed to her side as Mr. Etonne drummed his pointy nails on the counter, waiting.
Emerald ink swirled round and round on the page, forming each letter one by one:
To answer the riddle, seek the Bone Mother….
Sarah grunted, defeated. “You see? What does it mean? How can I do that? Baba Yaga has been in hiding for centuries. No one knows where to find her.”
“Have you asked the book?”
“Of course I have! Watch!” She leaned over the book again. “Grimoire, where can I find the Bone Mother?”
The ink looped and twirled again until….
Sometimes, it takes a voyage for an answer.
“That’s the same thing it said last time,” she groaned, her heart sinking into her stomach. She rocked back on her heels.
“Well? Your answer is quite obvious, isn’t it?” Mr. Etonne’s bushy gray eyebrow arched over his wrinkled forehead. “What’s the problem?”
Sarah and Edwin gaped at each other.
“We have to leave,” she mused. It was a horrible conclusion to come to, but— “We need to go find the Wood Witch herself.”
“H-h-how will we find her? You said it. No one’s s-seen her.”
“I do not appear to the seeking eye, but to the seeking mind. ~B.Y.” Sarah whispered.
“What?”
“It was the first thing the grimoire ever told me…” she drifted off, seeing the image of the swirling letters in her memory. Everything she knew about the ancient hag held true. “She never appears when you want her. Only when you need her.”
“Well…we really n-n-need her n-now,” Edwin said, his button eyes shifting back to the blank page. It gave Sarah an idea.
“Grimoire…we really need Baba Yaga. It’s a matter of life and death.”
The ink rippled for a moment like the pages were made of water and someone disturbed the surface. They began to form something new:
* * *
Sarah…meet me in the Forests of Blinking Eyes. Travel on hoof and spell.
Most magically,
~ B.
* * *
Sarah gasped her eyes darting up to Edwin’s again. She couldn’t stifle the wide grin spreading across her face. She felt her stomach lift. She hadn’t felt so much hope in months.
“Baba Yaga! She heard me!”
Mr. Etonne closed the book, pulling it close to his face to examine it better. He turned it over, frowning at the spine and then the back cover.
“Hmm…yes. Indeed. Very rare print…. I’ve only seen a few copies pass by this shop. And do you know why that is?” He peered over his spectacles at Sarah.
She shook her head.
“These grimoires are a direct line to the Wood Witch herself. I’d read an article about it. She announced coming out of retirement because she believed young Witches would soon need her. Happened right after all the hubbub in Prague recently….” He handed the spell book back to Sarah, his gaze darting knowingly between the two. “Be careful, dear Sarah and Edwin, members of the Revolution.”
She felt her face heat up. When did he realize who they were?
“Here you go. Don’t let this fall into the wrong hands.”
“Let’s head back,” Sarah said to Edwin. “I have to talk to Valek immediately.”
“Will you be needing anything else?”
“No. You’ve been so much help! Thank you, Mr. Entonne!” answered Sarah with a smile.
They watched the Shifter shrink from his robes, the material of the shoulders caving in first, and then the arms, until the entire thing hit the floor. Wriggling out from under the velvet, the cat appeared once again. “If you don’t mind…I hear a mouse trying to claw her way out from out behind the bookshelves.”
“Thanks again,” Sarah offered, pulling Edwin by the material of his wrist out of the shop and back into the early morning.
“When d-d-do you propose to leave?” he asked once they were traveling through the alleys toward home again, sounding upset.
“Soon. But we’ll need to travel when no one’s looking.”
Chapter 17
C o n s p I r a c y (This leads into the original scene when Valek wants to discuss his plan to find Francis with Sarah. They come home to find that Charlotte has discovered the second volume. Laced with poison, she becomes paralyzed.)
* * *
Lying flat on her back, sprawled out and sticky atop the covers despite what should have been a frigid January evening, Charlotte watched the swirling purple galaxies Sarah bewitched against her ceiling. How frustrating to have to be kept away from Valek, just when things were starting to make sense! How annoying to have her every move monitored and watched!
She huffed frustratedly to the empty room and the empty stares of her old stuffed animals. Amazing, she thought at the back of her mind, however, that Sarah could recreate my bedroom in such perfect detail.
Charlotte recalled the night when she and Valek were almost captured by Vladislov’s army of brutes—how they’d shoved their way through the front door in search of her. She’d hid the freezer, listening with her heart in her throat, while Valek made up lie after lie to get them to go away. They were very nearly found out, but made off by the skin of their teeth after Evangeline seemingly appeared out of thin air and doused Charlotte’s room with magic fire, leaving all her belongings, every tangible shred of evidence from her childhood spent in the vampire’s house, singed beyond recognition.
But thanks to Sarah, Charlotte now lie restless atop the same lacey duvet, staring at the same sunny, canary-colored walls, scowling at the same stupid dollhouse in the corner. Sarah loved it of course. She’d begged Charlotte to play with it. Charlotte told her she could keep it forever. She didn’t want any more to do with the things that made her a little girl in Valek’s eyes.
Just then, the door creaked open a hair. She craned her head to see his unholy eyes, aglow from within, glaring at her through the dark.
“Seems you don’t even have to speak of the devil, anymore,” she harrumphed, turning her face up toward the ceiling once more. “Seems now you need only think of him for him to appear.”
She wasn’t sure, but it sounded for a moment like Valek chuckled. “I only wish to check on you. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she lied and folded her arms across her chest. She ignored the fever beating in her face and the slosh in her stomach.
“Aren’t you col—”
“I said I’m fine,” she snapped. “Where are the others?”
She was trying to coax him to stay—trying to coerce him to enter a bit farther into the room, but he knew all her tricks. He stayed put, one claw gripping the door as it concealed half his face. Careful. Always careful.
“I’ve sent them away,” he admitted. “They should return early morning. They were growing . . . antsy.”
But that was the group. Bad influences like Lusian and Dusana always seemed to make the rest of them antsy. Ev
ery other topic of conversation was blood, these days. Blood. How to find it. How to hunt it. The right way to drain a person. Sometimes, they spoke in front of Charlotte without any sensitivity toward who and what she was.
“Do you need anything?” Valek asked when she didn’t say anything else.
“No. Thanks.”
“Very well. I shall be downstairs in my office,” he said and finally shut the door.
Angry tears gathered in her eyes and she balled her fists up in her bedclothes. She wanted him. She missed him. This wasn’t fair at all. At last, they had the entire house to themselves, and Valek couldn’t even touch her. More than that, he refused to stay longer than two minutes to even speak to her. She missed his breath in her ear, the way he groaned her name as his mouth lingered near her artery pulsing at the base of her throat, the goosebumps he gave her as his claws trailed her shoulders.
A great and terrible warmth blossomed up from between her legs, shooting through her stomach and into her chest. Just thinking about it forced her lips to part, inhaling deeply as she waded through the velvet feeling.
It wasn’t as if Charlotte didn’t know her body. Of course, she assumed, every girl did. When she were alone with the quiet. When nobody was looking. When she could relax, to put herself in a trance and let her mind drift to wherever . . .
She sighed, quietly as she could, and pulled up the hem of her nightdress so that it bunched around her hips. No one would know. Valek was all the way down in his jail of paperwork he didn’t need to look at.
Valek, she thought again, another luxurious wave of ecstasy lapping at her skin as she thought of his mouth—his hands—the beautiful mess of his hair around a face androgynous and sculpted like an ancient Greek had dreamed him up.
Her fingers explored, dipping beyond her undergarments until she found herself at last, circling around the spot so that her back arched and her toes curled. She gulped, her throat dry, but her mouth watering at the same time, her other hand gripping hard to her breast.
His shoulders. His arms. His chest. She imagined his mouth on her, searching, licking. Minutes passed and she needed to bite down hard over her lower lip to keep her cries silent as she lost herself in her own throes of rapture.
There was a creak on the other side of the door, so quiet, she might have missed it if she hadn’t been listening intently for it—a sign that he was there. And he was. She knew he was. She smiled at herself in the dark, at her marvelous cunning. She hoped he was on his knees. She hoped she’d driven him mad.
* * *
Valek was as still as he could ever be, lingering just on the other side of Charlotte’s bedroom door. He shouldn’t have been listening. But he was.
The trappings of Charlotte’s mind were lush. Marvelous. Her scandal made his mouth water and every dead piece within him coursed to life, enlivened by her electricity. Her warmth was almost powerful enough to heat through the door as he remained with his forehead pressed against it, claw lingering over the knob. But he couldn’t.
He remained there, bargaining against himself even to breathe as he listened to Charlotte’s pleasure—her shallow, fast breathing and the ever-quickening rate of her pulse. Every few moments, it skipped a beat, and the wilder it got, the closer he knew she was getting to finding her end. He could smell her.
There was nothing he wanted more than to tear the door from the hinges—or, to crash through it. Hell, he would have set the entire wall on fire if he could just—
No. No, of course he couldn’t. Charlotte was very ill, he reminded himself. But that didn’t keep him from wanting to feel her, from wanting to feel something human again. From wanting to feel a woman that way again.
The softest of groans resonated from beyond the door, and Valek lost his mind. His hips reacted, pushing toward the wall. He couldn’t help it as he sank his fangs into his own fist and lapped up the blood he drew.
Auto-sanguination, the act of dinking one’s own blood was not very satisfactory, but to better feel the makings of his own manhood, he needed jumpstart his corpse of a body and that was the best way he knew how. If he couldn’t be next to her, could he very well as much share in her experience? He drank until he was erect, which was a stupid mistake. He wanted to scrape his claws through the walls, but instead he raked them through his hair. There were so many fantasies he kept secret—so many nightmarish, horrible, amazing things he wanted to do to the girl. She could never know he’d stayed there . . . listening. She could never know.
At last, it happened. Paired with no other sound than the coils of her mattress, the scent of her arousal flooded the corridor as if it had been storm water fast escaping from the space above the threshold. Valek pivoted, gasping as he pressed his back against the wall. He wanted her. Wildly. Madly. Deeply. Oh, how he wanted to tear her to delicious pieces and devour her only to put her back together and do it again. And again. And again. His dead heart gave a great thud as something—it couldn’t have been life, for that was impossible, but something—beat in his cheeks and forehead.
There were light footsteps. His breath hitched and he froze, stepping away from the door at once.
It opened. And then she appeared, standing before him in the shadows of the corridor, her feet bear and her nightdress sort of wrinkly as it fell to her knees.
His nostrils flared for the passion still lingering over the cotton of her undergarments and the pads of her fingers. It gave him half a mind of smack her across the face and half a mind to shove her up against the wall and—
“I thought you said you were going down to your office,” she said innocently.
“I . . . I’d forgotten something.” The words came out hoarse as if he’d downed a tumbler full of rotten vampire ashes.
Her cheeks were a delightful ruddy pink, her lips slightly more swollen than usual. He didn’t miss the way her knees quivered in the smallest of ways. Her eyes were hooded and the way she pressed her mouth into a tight line told him she was still suffering the aftershocks brought on by the demise of her sanity.
“Was . . . there something you needed?” he asked, trying his best to keep his tone even.
She smiled when she met his eye. She knew. She knew. “Just going down for a glass of water. That’s all,” she said sweetly before descending, gliding that hand over the banister.
Charlotte was cunning. Charlotte knew how to bait. And Valek got the feeling Charlotte would one day make a better Vampire than he could ever be. And that was the thing which scared him most of all.
Monarch
“Quick! How are my laurels?”
With her tongue out, Cinder adjusted her crown of gold-painted leaves.
“Hold it steady!” she barked at the scullery maid who was beginning to droop and perspire, for she’d been holding the heavy mirror in place for far too long.
“This is your moment, girl,” Balder rumbled near her ear, his great red beard quivering with his glee. “This is what you’ve been waiting for.” His meaty hands were on her shoulders squeezing and shaking, jostling her a bit.
She grinned at her father in the glass. “What we’ve been waiting for. Mother would be pleased.”
“That she would.” He nodded. Clapping his hands, he said, “Big smiles! Like we practiced. Make them love you!”
Cinder craned her head up, admiring all sides of her reflection. The Regime Palace’s newly-hired salon staff worked all morning to rope her hair in intricate braids around the top of her head, allowing the rest of it to cascade in golden heaps over her shoulder and down her front.
“Shouldn’t be so hard. People adore beauty and social stature over actual talent and ability any day. Good thing I possess all four.”
“Good thing, my Lady!” added the young castle maid and when Cinder hissed for her to “Hush up!” she nearly dropped the mirror.
“Cinder,” came Danek’s voice from the fire-lit corridor. “Any word from the search parties?”
She snorted, turning to leer at him over her shoulder. He an
d his rotund wife were really starting to dampen her parade.
“They’re working as fast as they can, Price!” she huffed. “Don’t see you out looking for your son, do we?”
He frowned and grumbled, “Thought it better to wait here…in case he…might try to come home.”
“The Weekly Cackle is here,” announced one of the new pages as he rushed in. “They’d like a few short words with you before you address the district.” With the quick of nod of his head, he waved in a stalky man with pond-grease skin and an oily beard.
Cinder’s eyes narrowed at him. “You’re rather far from your marsh, Vodnik.”
He bowed deeply at the waist, a notepad clutched in one of his webbed hands. “Salazar Quipp, editor in chief of the Weekly Cackle at your service, great Lady Price.”
“Ah!” She wagged her finger. “You were the one who made public my family’s disgrace—who published such rubbish. Dreaded Vampire Ruzik,” she scoffed. “I should peel the whiskers off your face—” Balder’s tight grip on her arm reminded her to remain diplomatic. She straightened herself and lifted her chin at him. “Let me begin again. Paint me in a less-than-favorable light, Mr. Quipp, and I shall eat your frog eggs for breakfast and drain every pond this side of the Slovakian border.”
His resulting laughter was high pitched and nervous as he tugged at his collar. He shook his head.
“Not at all, my Lady, not at all. In fact, I wanted to personally thank you on behalf of this district for caring enough about us lowly Central European folk enough to preside over Lord Price’s region while he is…erm…recovering.” The frog-faced man glanced around at the rest of the faces with an apology in his fish-bowl eyes.
Cinder smiled, smoothing her rippling golden skirts. “Not at all, Mr. Quipp. The people come first.”
He lifted the pencil from behind his ear. “Can I quote you?”
“Absolutely.”
“I will be sitting front row for your speech, you know.”
Of Blood and Magic Page 22
