Daughter of the Spellcaster (22 page)

She stopped inching.

“I set the curtains in Dad’s study on fire the first time I touched it. Then, the other night, I set the weeds on fire out back.”

Lena’s heart was pounding with something she’d never felt in his presence until now. Fear.

“I was reading one of those books my dad left you, and I found a chapter about how to cleanse and consecrate magical tools, so I thought that might help. I tried burying it outside overnight. You know, in case it had...bad mojo or something.”

“And how did that work out for you?” Her voice was trembling. She clamped her jaw and cleared her throat.

“I don’t know. I still can’t seem to control the thing.” He lifted his eyes to meet hers. “Or I couldn’t, last time I tried. But now it’s gone and I don’t know who has it, and between what I’ve seen it do and what you’ve dreamed of it doing—”

“Of
you
doing.”

“I think the thing is dangerous. I think we need to find it.” He swallowed hard, rising to his feet. “God, I hate seeing that fear in your eyes. Lena, how can I make you believe I would never hurt you? I swear, I wouldn’t.”

“I know.” But she didn’t. She didn’t know at all. She didn’t even know how he felt about her. Just today she had thought things were beginning to change, but up to then it had just been practical for him to be here, to be close by, two parents, one child. There had been no love. Not the wild, all-consuming, die-without-you kind of love she needed from him. Passion from time to time, yes, but not that fiery, unbridled, soul-fire kind of love. Not the kind she remembered from the prince of her past.

“You said you found the knife,” he told her softly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugged. “I had Mom check, and she said there was nothing there. I thought I had...hallucinated it.”

“Well, you didn’t. And that should tell you that you can trust me, Lena, because if I meant to hurt you, it would have been better for me to let you go on believing you had imagined it. Wouldn’t it?”

“That makes sense.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

She held his eyes, searching them, wishing she could read his soul. “I told Bahru. I thought he might know something about it.”
But then his eyes flashed red, and later I saw him talking to a demon in a cave behind a waterfall, and the cat thinks he’s evil.

She didn’t say any of that last part out loud, though. How could she? For all she knew he and Bahru were in this thing together.

Doesn’t make any sense. Ryan hates Bahru, always has.

You willing to risk your baby on that?

“No,” she whispered.

“No what?” Ryan asked.

She stopped inching, just turned and walked away. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

He lunged after her, grabbing hold of her arm and turning her to face him again. “Lena, you can’t honestly believe—”

“Let go of me.” The words fell like chips of ice, emotionless, deep, commanding.

He looked down at his hand on her arm, then let go. “I wouldn’t hurt you or the baby, you have to know that.”

“Right now all I
know
is that I don’t want to be anywhere near you or Bahru or the damn house ghost or—”

“The house ghost? I thought he was gone.”

“Not far enough.” She moved past him to the kitchen, and this time he let her go.

* * *

The dishes were finished, the house in order, and Ryan was in the attic, poring over books on mysticism as if his life depended on it. Lena tugged her mother into the temple room with her, then closed the door and turned the lock.

Interior doorknob locks were pathetic at best. Easily picked, she knew, but she hoped that wouldn’t matter. She hurried to the window to take a look outside. The sky was clear and dark blue, sparkling with stars that seemed to blink into existence out of nothing with every few seconds that passed. “Sleet-storm warning, my ass,” she muttered.

“Honey, what in the world is going on with you?”

She let the curtain fall back into place and turned to face her mother, noticing the cat for the first time. She was curled up on the altar, blinking as if they had disturbed her from a very important nap. “I should have known this is where you’d be,” Lena said. “I think you’re smarter than all of us. This is the safest room in the house.”

Her mother blinked and looked at the cat, then back at Lena. “Tell me what’s wrong. You acted like you wanted to throw Bahru out the door at dinner.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly gushingly friendly to him, either. Why is that, Mom?”

Selma averted her eyes. “I don’t know. I feel...nervous and unsettled around him. But only since—”

“Since that night you can’t remember?”

Selma met her daughter’s eyes again, frowning. “Yes. Since that night. How did you know?”

Lena lowered her head, pacing away, circling naturally in a clockwise direction. “You know those pictures on your cell phone? The ones you don’t remember taking?”

“Yes. People in monks’ robes standing around a fire in the woods.”

Lena nodded. “Today I saw Bahru with a robe just like that.”

“When? Where, for goodness’ sake?”

“When I went out after the cat.” She paused by the altar and ran her hand over the animal’s silky soft head, down her back. “She was leading me, Mom. I swear she was leading me.”

Selma’s eyes shifted from the cat, then back to Lena, over and over. “Leading you where, honey?”

“That spot with the pond and the waterfall that overlooks the lake. There’s a cave behind the waterfall that I didn’t know was there.”

Selma frowned. “A cave? I’ve never seen a cave.”

“Well, it’s there,” Lena said harshly, and saw her mother’s eyes widen at her tone. “Bahru was just inside, talking to someone. A large, dark, shadowy shape.”

“A dark, shadowy shape...like the house ghost?”

Lena nodded. “Bahru told it that if he had known we were going to banish it from the house, he would have stopped us.”

Selma’s eyes widened even further.

“He called it ‘Master’ and, worse, he said once the baby comes my power would die and then ‘it’ would live again.”

“My God. Are you sure?”

Lena nodded hard, deciding not to mention the letter or the pages. Not until she knew what they contained. Goddess, she was half afraid that when she went to look at them again, they would be gone. Vanished. Afraid she’d been imagining them this whole time.

“We can’t trust Bahru, Mom. And I don’t think we can trust Ryan, either.” Then she finally told her mother about her visions of him stabbing her with a golden knife immediately after the birth of their child. The same knife she’d had her mother look for in his truck.

“But it wasn’t there,” Selma said.

“I know. He said someone took it. He told me about it earlier. He has it, Mom. Or
had
it. That exact blade, only now it’s missing. And the only person I told about it was Bahru.”

Selma listened, and her face grew harder with each word Lena said. In the end she put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “We’re going to leave here—just the two of us. Tonight. We’ll leave everything behind.”

“Mrrrow,” said the cat.

“Everything but the cat,” Selma amended. “We’ll go where no one can find us, and that’s where we’ll stay until the baby comes. All right?”

Lena nodded. “That’s exactly what I was going to say. But we have to be sneaky. We have to get out of here without Ryan or Bahru knowing about it.”

“If Ryan is somehow involved in...in whatever is going on here,” her mother said softly, “if he’s got some kind of mystical connection to you and the baby, then how can we get away without him knowing, honey?”

“I don’t know.”

Drawing a deep breath, then releasing it all out at once, Selma moved across the room to open the wooden cabinet, then reached to the back and brought out a small burlap pouch with a drawstring closure. She unknotted it and drew out a tiny ornate bottle of smoky dark glass with a pewter vulture for a stopper.

“What’s that, Mom?”

“Belladonna,” she said. “A few drops in his tea—or, better yet, cocoa, because the sweetness will cover the taste—and he’ll sleep for hours.”

Lena stared at the vial. “A few drops too much could kill him.”

“I know. I’ll err on the side of caution. In case we’re wrong and he’s innocent.”

Lena bit her lip, her heart bleeding, her mind swirling. Images of the prince who would have done anything to save her warred inside her troubled mind with the Ryan whose attitude until recently had seemed so indifferent, so dispassionate. And both men battled in her mind against the image of the man standing over her bed, raising a dagger over his head to drive it into her heart.

Which one was real?

Lowering her head, she shook it slowly. “I can’t let you do it, Mom. I can’t risk hurting him. I love him so much. I want to think I’m wrong. I want to believe there’s some explanation for the dream, the vision.”

“You’re risking your child’s life, Lena.”

“No, I’m only risking my own. He won’t hurt Eleanora. I know that much for sure.”

“Would you risk the life of your child if you
weren’t
sure?” Selma asked.

Lena shook her head. “Of course not, Mom.”

“So how can you ask me to risk the life of mine?”

“I’m an adult. It’s my life to risk. I love him. I’d die for him. It’s worth it. I
do
want to sneak away, I
do
want to have the baby somewhere safe and figure out the rest of this afterward. I want to stay alive to raise my child. But I can’t risk Ryan’s life to do that. What if I’m wrong?” She closed her eyes and prayed that there was a rational explanation for everything she’d seen in the chalice. “We’ll get out of here, Mom, but we’ll find some way to do it that doesn’t involve poisoning Ryan. All right?”

Selma looked down, blinking tears from her eyes. “All right, hon. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.”

15

“R
yan?”

Ryan looked up from the book he was perusing, all about hauntings and ghosts and banishing them, to see Selma poking her head up through the trapdoor into the attic. He’d had one brief, idiotic moment when he’d hoped it was Lena. But no, he’d scared the hell out of her, destroyed any trust she’d had in him, and it was going to take something huge to win it back.

If he could. It was beginning to feel to him as if she stopped trusting him every time he hiccupped lately. And he wondered why that was.

“I’m not interrupting, am I?” Selma asked.

He shook off his brooding and smiled a welcome. It felt weak, but she would understand. She came the rest of the way up, a steaming, chocolate-scented cup of cocoa in her hand, the smell tickling his taste buds to life.

“I was having cocoa before bed, and I thought you might want some, too.” She crossed the dim attic carefully and set the mug on an upturned wooden crate near his side. The light was on, a dusty bulb dangling from the ceiling with a long pull-chain attached. It was great for reading but awful for people. Even sweet Selma had an almost evil hue to her under that harsh overhead glow.

“Thanks for that,” he said with a nod at the mug. “How is Lena doing?”

“Oh, I think she’ll be fine. Hormones and pregnancy really do a number on a woman’s nerves. We tend to worry about everything this close to delivering. I think she’ll come around. Just give her a little time.”

“She doesn’t trust me,” he said. And then he thought, why not just throw it right out there, put his cards on the table? “I know I did a number on her before, when we were dating. Worked so hard to convince her I was a player that she bought it a little too much. But I keep getting the feeling there’s more to it than that.”

Selma sighed and sank down onto an old black metal trunk. She seemed deep in thought for a moment. “You know, you might be right.”

“You think?”

“I hadn’t given it much thought, but...yeah. When a woman brings a child into the world, she starts thinking big-time about her own childhood. The good things she wants to pass on...the not-so-good things she doesn’t want to repeat.”

He shook his head. “I’ve never heard Lena say anything bad about her childhood. She loved growing up with you, Selma. Don’t try to take the blame for—”

“I know she loved growing up with me. But she also grew up without her father.” Her brows drew together. “She was only three when he left us. She cried for him for days, but she was so little...I honestly thought she’d forgotten all about it.”

“She’s never mentioned it since?”

“Not once. But I should have known it was in there, maybe deeply buried...but still there. Kids don’t forget that kind of thing. And you know, it might very well be why she’s so quick to mistrust you. She might not even be aware of it.”

He reached for the mug and brought it to his lips.

“Ryan, wait!”

The cocoa burned, and he jerked it away again with a hiss. “Ouch. You’re right, that needs to cool for a minute.” He set the mug down.

She sighed in apparent relief, looked from the mug to him, and wrung her hands a little.

“You okay, Selma?”

She nodded, forcing a smile that was as weak as his own had been earlier. “So what are you reading about?” She nodded at the book.

“Bound spirits. You know, bound to a house the way that ghost of yours seemed to be.”

“What made you want to read about that?”

“Just something Lena said about it seeming to be angry about your ghostbusting. She said it seemed almost...irrational. Desperate.”

“And what have you learned?”

He frowned. “Well, for one thing, they’re not always ghosts. Any number of things can pass from their plane—into ours through a...a doorway, but that wasn’t the word they used.”

“A portal,” she said.

“Yeah, a portal. If it’s left open, you can get a lot of traffic. I mean, I never believed in any of this stuff, and frankly, I’m a little stunned to find myself researching it as if it’s real. But I’ve seen so much since I’ve been here....” He gave his head a shake. “If there
is
one of these portals nearby, then theoretically at least, all sorts of beasties could have come through. Demons, spirits, divinities, lesser gods even.” Then he shrugged, feeling a little sheepish. “Listen to
me
telling
you
. You already know all about this stuff.” He reached for the cocoa.

She covered his hand with hers. “Still too hot. Please, keep talking, Ryan. There’s no way I know everything in every one of these volumes. A wise woman never stops learning.”

“Okay,” he said nodding. “Okay. So if there
is
a portal nearby, and if your house ghost or whatever he is did come through it, then he might be stuck here. The book says entities that enter our world that way can sometimes be bound to the area in the immediate vicinity of the portal until and unless they manage to...what was the term?” He opened the book, flipped pages, then said, “‘Manifest in the physical.’”

She blinked. “And does the book say how, precisely, such an entity would go about doing that?”

“Not that I’ve found so far.”

“Mom?”

They both turned to see Lena coming up the ladder to join them. “I just checked outside. It’s a full-blown sleet storm, just like Bahru predicted.”

“Were you planning to go somewhere?” Ryan asked.

She shrugged. “Not really, I was just nervous. I could have the baby anytime, after all. I want Doc Cartwright to be able to get to me. Right now the news says no unnecessary travel. A lot of secondary roads are already closed.”

She met his eyes. “Ryan, I’m sorry about earlier. I was—” She broke off as she looked around, taking in the books piled around him, the cocoa cooling on the nearby crate. Then, out of the blue, she sent her mother a furious look. “I said
no!
”

“I made an executive decision,” Selma said. “But I’m already having second—”

Ryan reached for his cocoa as he wondered what the hell they were talking about. It had to be drinkable by now.

“Ryan!” Lena lurched toward him, tripping over nothing at all and flailing wildly. He sprang to his feet to catch her, and she hit the mug and sent it flying across the attic. It smashed into a wall and shattered just as he caught her and drew her against his chest to keep her from falling. Though the contact felt good, she’d damn near scared him gray. “What the
hell,
Lena?”

“I...saw a mouse.”

He frowned until his eyebrows met, searching her face, completely certain he was in the middle of a conversation that was flying right over his head. “Are you okay?”

She nodded and gazed up at him in a way that made him think she was over whatever had upset her earlier and was back to adoring him again. God, her mother had been right about pregnancy hormones. One minute she was terrified of him, the next she was looking like she wanted to kiss his face off.

He knew for sure that
he
wanted to kiss
her
face off. He felt himself being pulled closer but stopped when he heard her mother gently clear her throat. His hands on Lena’s shoulders, he waited as she steadied herself.

“Ryan was just reading about spirits sometimes being bound to areas near the portals through which they entered our world,” Selma said. “The text says that in such cases they can break that bond only if they can manifest in the physical.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “But how do they do that, exactly? ‘Manifest in the physical’?”

Lena blinked and looked from him to her mother and back again. “It means it needs a body. It can’t leave the area until it gets one.”

“So it can’t let the body it wants leave the area, either,” her mother said.

Lena’s expression had changed again—to a look of pure, undiluted terror. Her eyes were huge, and darting back and forth. “That’s what happened with that freak storm the other night and the tree falling across the road right in front of us, and with the sleet storm tonight. We can’t leave,” she whispered. “It won’t
let us
leave.”

“Lena, what do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“It wants our baby!”

She turned and scrambled down the ladder so fast he was afraid she would fall. He heard her feet pounding through the hallway below, heard a door slam, and looked at Selma as if for answers.

She had tears running down her cheeks.

* * *

Lena ran to the temple room, and slammed and locked the door. She got it now. Their house ghost was no ordinary ghost. Somewhere near here—
the cave, it has to be in the cave—
there must be an open portal to the Otherworlds.

She grabbed the sea salt from the cabinet, waved her hand over it to empower it, then scattered it in a sloppy clockwise circle around the room.

This thing, whatever it was, had come through the Portal, and now it was looking for a body. Her baby’s body! Did it make any sense? No. She had no idea why this being thought becoming a newborn infant would serve its purpose, whatever that might be. But did she believe it anyway? You bet she did. And Bahru, a man she had once thought was her friend, was helping it!

She threw the plastic container of sea salt aside and grabbed a bundle of herbs. Not sage alone, not this time. She wanted, needed, more power. She grabbed angelica, patchouli, sandalwood, orrisroot, snatching pinches of each dried herb from its jar and dropping them onto a concave abalone shell. Crunching and charging them all at once by rubbing them between her flat palms, letting them fall into the shell, scooping them up again and repeating. She visualized a ring of smoke that hardened into one of pure, impenetrable power, and muttered words to her unseen enemy as they came to her, without thinking first.

“I command you by heaven, by earth, by the river, by the power of mountains and lakes... The house I enter, you shall not enter, the door I close, you shall not open.”

And then she bit her lip, because while her mind had heard those words, had understood them, her lips had been speaking them in some other tongue. Some long-ago language.
Akkadian,
someone whispered inside her mind. And she began again, without even knowing how.

“Uta am i-i-ki, ana am, ersetam, nara-am...”

She grabbed her lighter and flicked it to life, touching the flame to the herbs and whispering the chant over and over.

The entity that had come through the portal wouldn’t let her leave this place, she knew it for sure. Whatever it was, it didn’t want her to escape its reach until her baby was born.

But that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying. And she would succeed, dammit. She
would
. Because she was a witch.

She carried the smoking herbs around the room, strengthening the circle she had made, and then setting them on the altar and letting them continue to smolder.

She had to get out of here, out of Havenwood, out of Milbury. But it would be easier and safer by day. Getting herself and her baby killed in an escape attempt would do no good at all. She just had to get through tonight. One more night. Just one. And then she would get out of town tomorrow. She would walk if she had to.

She got some holy water, the good stuff she’d been saving, collected from a midnight thunderstorm on the Summer Solstice and charged again beneath a lunar eclipse. A tiny pebble taken from the grounds of Stonehenge, a gift from a friend years ago, rested in the bottom of the bottle. She shook out the water, sprinkling a small, tight circle all around her. Then she sat in the center, her knees drawn to her chest, her wand in her hand.

The cat came and rubbed against her legs. Reminding her of the parchment pages, the letter. She quickly got up and retrieved them, sat back down, then sprinkled the water around herself again for good measure.

“It can’t get in. It can’t get in. It can’t get in,” she whispered.

Someone knocked on the door, and she damn near jumped a foot off the floor. But it was only her mother and Ryan. They took turns reasoning with her, pleading with her to come out.

“I’m not coming out until morning,” she told them. “It won’t hurt you as long as you’re not trying to stop it. You’ll be fine if you just leave it alone. I’m safe in here. The baby, too. We’re not coming out. So just leave us alone.”

She heard Ryan sigh. “Lena, please, hon. I’m not going to let anything hurt you. You know that. Please, babe, just come out. Things were going so well—can’t we get back to that? Please? You can’t stay in there all night, there’s not even a bed. Lena, come on, be reasonable.”

She went to the stereo, an old-school all-in-one that had dual tape decks in the front, a five-disk CD changer and a radio tuner. She pushed play, not caring what was in there.

“The Goddess Chant” began to play. She cranked it loud enough to drown out her mother and Ryan outside the door, and eventually they went away. But she kept the music playing. Its harmonies unfolded, built, entwined, empowered the energy of protection around her. Her arms around her belly, she sank to the floor in the center of the room, invoking her protectors to surround her on this night. To protect her child, and her, from whatever evil had set its sights on them. To empower her to take her daughter to safety at the first light of dawn.

Feeling stronger by the minute, she opened the envelope with her name on it, and began to read.

* * *

“It’s not good,” Ryan said. “She just doesn’t trust me.” He hung his head and walked away from the closed, locked door, knowing he wasn’t going to get through to Lena. Not tonight, anyway. Not now that she knew about the knife.

“But
I
do.” Selma put a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t, when I first learned about the athame—the knife—but I do now, Ryan. Listen, she’s scared. I told you what she said happened out there tonight, and I believe her. Thinking back, it seems that cat has been trying to get us to follow her since she first showed up here. And Bahru—I’ve got to tell you, Ryan, I’ve been feeling
very
uncomfortable around him since that night I blacked out. It all makes sense.”

“That there’s some kind of demonic force looking to take over our baby’s body? That
makes sense
to you?”