Succession of Witches (23 page)

It was only a few minutes of walking before the slumbering trees of the forest gave way to sandier, muddier terrain. On the shores of the Atlantic, the Outer Banks of North Carolina had miles of marshland, some of which was federally protected. Naturally, Helen had no interest in sticking to any kind of trail, and it wasn’t long before Sam was making his way through waist-high reeds.

It was a strange sensation, being here again; he coul
d remember when the vegetation was taller than he was. Serenus was quiet, likely lost in in his own memories, while the girls were just annoyed. It was twilight, and it was hard to find footing. The sky was an unsympathetic gray, thick clouds letting through no sign of the waning sunlight; the area was known for rainstorms of all kinds, but tonight, there would be no rain: only one of those suffocating, starless nights he remembered from his youth.

“Ew, ew, ew, ew,” said Cassie, trying to pick her way through the mud without getting her boots filthy. “She said we were going to the woods, not the swamp!”

“Marsh,” Sam corrected. “This whole area is marshland. There are even some species here you can’t find anywhere else in the world.”

“Thank you for sharing,” she quipped, then turned serious. “Did you really grow up around here?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why don’t you have an accent like you’re from here?”

“Because I forbid it,” Helen called from the front, somehow overhearing their conversation.

“You can’t forbid someone from having an accent, that’s not how it works!” Cassie called over the sound of a gust of wind through the reeds.

Suddenly Helen slowed down, her black high heels mysteriously immaculate despite all the muddy ground she had traversed. With her tan trench coat whipping around her legs, she came to a stop at the side of a large pool, bordered on the far side by a field full of tall salt marsh cordgrass. Sam couldn’t see past them, but from a combination of the briny smell and his memories, he guessed the ocean couldn’t be far beyond.

Looking out at the pool of brown water, Helen suddenly began to speak. “As a witch, I’m not very impressive. That’s why it’s so important for me to be near the sea, so I have some source of power to draw from.”

“I don’t think that’s a fair statement,” Serenus began, but Helen cut him off before he could continue.

“Like all witches, my natural magic is white—what we call white magic today—but when I do something like this, for example,” she said, sweeping her arm in a wide arc: where the surface of the water had been perfectly still, a gentle ripple appeared. “
—it’s colorless. I’m using the power of the water to act on the water; there’s no intent, malicious or benevolent, thus the magic cannot be white or black.”

“That’s you,” Sam interjected. “I can’t lift a cup off the table without it being considered black, whatever my intention is.”

“We’re not talking about you right now,” Helen said smoothly. “Now, even if I were a much more powerful witch and used this water to create a tidal wave, a wave that could kill and destroy, it still wouldn’t necessarily be black. So as you can see, it is entirely possible to use colorless magic to great effect, even today.”

“Is there a point to this?” Sam asked, crossing his arms.

Helen put her hands in her coat pockets, looking out over the marsh and not at him. The wind was picking up, making the reeds sway to and fro. “Do you have any idea why your father left the Upper World, Samuel?”

“What?” said
Sam. As always, he was completely mystified by the sudden turns his mother’s mind took. “Wasn’t it because he wanted more power?”

Helen scoffed at that.
“Hardly. Exodus, Ten Plagues, Slaying of the First Born. The Old Testament says that the Almighty gave the Angel of Death the night off while he killed all of the Egyptian baby sons. A PR cover-up if ever there was one; the Angel of Death didn’t take the night off, he had quit altogether,” she said. “If killing babies was the privilege of the righteous, what did that make Hell?”

For a few moments, there was only the sound of the w
ind whistling through the tall grass. Sam felt like he’d been hit in the solar plexus. “If that’s true, why did you never tell me until now?” he asked in a small voice, wondering if she would even hear him over the wind. Of course, she did.

“Because it was never relevant.
The reason why it matters today is because I want you to understand the true nature of angels, and the whole world above: that absolute, yet totally unpredictable morality. One minute you are told not to kill, the next minute, mass infanticide, but it all supposedly makes sense due to some divine, benevolent will—a will that is beyond your comprehension by definition,” she said, still not looking at him. “Once your father could no longer understand that, no longer tolerate it, he had to leave. He had no choice.”

It was Miri, quiet since they had left the house,
who broke the ensuing silence. Her high-pitched voice shouted over the wind. “I don’t understand, what are you saying? That angels aren’t good and demons aren’t evil?”

“I’m saying that the world is a far more complicated place than you had any reason to suspect. But now, with angels among us, you can no longer remain ignorant.” Finally, she turned to Sam, her expression that same impenetrable mask that had so tormented him as a child.

“Angels?” said Cassie in a small voice. “You mean, we’re….”

Sam looked at the girl, mind reeling. Was it possible? When he looked at her, standing there in muddy boots and a worn down coat, it seemed absurd. And yet, wasn’t it she who had insisted on saving Ethan, no matter what bedlam it would unleash in all
of their lives? Because it was ‘right,’ because of that overpowering, yet strangely arbitrary sense of morality that even at that time, he’d felt was a part of her she couldn’t help?

He moved his gaze to Aeka, and swallowed. With her beautiful features, flowing golden hair and multi-colored eyes, she looked every inch an angel, even in a beat-up looking pair of denim overalls. She looked like an angel out of a child’s storybook, minus the feathery wings. Looking at her, he felt in his gut that his mother was telling the truth.

While they all stood there, shellshocked, Helen continued. “You wondered why, when the blond one was wearing her armor, magic did not appear to work on her. That’s because to her, there is no black or white magic, only Magic,” she said, turning to rummage through her pocket. “Point a black curse at her, and it passes her by; she doesn’t even recognize it as magic. It’s a perversion, an over-engineered, degenerative copy of the kind of natural magic that makes her function, that she understands. Real, primal magic only responds to like. Speaking of which,” she said, then threw something from her pocket into the dark pool.

Sam walked forward to approach her slowly, a sense of creeping dread making him feel ill. “Helen, what did you just do?” he asked.

She didn’t turn to him, only continued looking at the smooth surface of the water.

“Mother….” he said, almost pleading.

“Here it comes,” she said. “Brace yourselves, although it won’t help much.”

All at once, the surface of the water broke, and then Sam couldn’t see; it was like the pond had exploded, and his vision was so full of water that all that was visible was a kind of white blur. When he recovered, now soaked to the skin as water continued to pummel him, he could just barely make out the shape of a
large creature before him. A snakelike creature, perhaps three times as tall as he was, sticking half out of the water, calling out in a deep, pulsating wail that was like nothing he had ever heard before. Whether the creature was screaming in agony or joy, he had no way of knowing.

The creature bucked violently, sending sheets of water cascading. “Helen, you’ve made your point!” Serenus yelled over the roar of the creature. “Send that thing back!”

Helen turned and looked at Serenus over her shoulder. Even soaking wet, she looked unperturbed. “Oh? Sorry, I can’t control it, only summon it.”

Sam took an involuntary step back before he stopped himself, afraid to move and attract the thing’s attention. He could see it better now; it wasn’t so much a snake as a large dun-colored fish, only with
ragged, uneven scales and teeth that must have been nearly the size of his forearm. In its huge black eyes there was no recognition, only chaos. It thrashed like it was in terrible pain.

“If you won’t get rid of it, I will!” he yelled, then threw his arms out, performing a killing curse. There was that blissful moment of release, of inner calm, that always made the world seem to slow down around him for a few moments, and then nothing. He could see the curse hit the creature, a beam of shadow imperceptible to the human eye that shattered at the creature’s chest, but there was no effect.

“Weren’t you listening, my little lamb?” said Helen, raising her voice to be heard over the screeching wind and the creature’s ceaseless screaming. “Your magic is too dirty; like responds to like. Leviathan doesn’t know your curses from a hole in the wall.”

“Leviathan?!”
Serenus yelled. “Helen, you didn’t—!”

“I always wondered if this is really what Hobbes had in mind,” she responded in a thoughtful tone. She looked over her shoulder again to take in the sight of Serenus. “You have the most wonderful look right now. Terror wipes all that unbearable smugness right off of your face. I was wrong; I have missed you,” she said, smiling for the first time that day.

Sam began to have trouble catching his breath. How could he possibly protect Cassie, protect any of them, when his magic didn’t work on this thing?

He saw a red blur out of the corner of his eye, and realized Miri was running up to attack the creature an instant before it happened.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that. You’re an abomination, my dear. He doesn’t like that,” said Helen.

As she spoke, the Leviathan hit Miri in the chest with its snout, sending her flying backwards. Her back hit a tree with a sickening crack, and she fell in a heap of skinny limbs. The whole thing had taken less than a second.

Serenus and Sam exchanged sickened, terrified glances. They had always known Helen was crazy, joked about it even, but this crazy? Was she really going to let this thing kill all of them? And for what?

“Aeka!”
Cassie called out suddenly. “Don’t!”

The small girl had moved, and was standing directly in front of the Leviathan, knee-deep in the water. Sam began to move toward her, then stopped, a million questions paralyzing him. If she really was an angel, was she even in danger? If she was, did he have a prayer of saving her? And if so, should he? She wasn’t his familiar—what was she to him, exactly?

But the change in the creature’s behavior brought his inner torment to a halt. That deep braying, a sound with vibrations that Sam could feel painfully in his jaw, quieted down, then stopped altogether. Its thrashing changed to a simple side-to-side swaying, as it fixed its empty eyes on the strange girl in front of it. Aeka tilted her head to the side, and it mimicked her, studying her.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Everyone was transfixed by the meeting of girl and serpent. Sam didn’t know how long they all stood there, motionless, but by the time the creature gently lowered its snout toward her, it had changed from twilight to full dark.

As they all watched in disbelief, the creature began to gently nuzzle Aeka’s stomach with its long snout, making a low thrumming sound reminiscent of a kitten’s purr. She laughed, an intoxicating sound, like a babbling brook made up of tiny crystal bells. Far above her, there was a circular clearing in the clouds, the black of the night sky poking through the gray, as though she had a halo of moonlight.

The sky was full of stars.

It was mostly silent on the way back to the house, with everyone too shocked to speak. When they went inside, depositing their dirty shoes and coats in Helen’s washroom, Sam finally spoke up. “If you want to mess with me,
that’s fine,” he said, throwing his coat into a corner filled with wrinkled clothes and, surprise, more books. “But why them?” he said, indicating Cassie, Aeka and the others. “Why did you have to put them in danger?”

“I didn’t,” said Helen, shrugging. She stepped out of her high heels carefully. “I knew we would all be fine.”

“How could you possibly know that? You summoned a giant monster!” said Sam, slamming his fist into the wall.

Helen narrowed her eyes. “This is my home. Watch yourself.”

Miri, who’d had to be carried home on Serenus’ back after being swatted into a tree, suddenly woke with a start. “What happened? Did we beat it?”

“
It’s fine, Miriam,” said Serenus, letting her down gently. “The Leviathan is gone.”

“Gone?” Miri asked. “Gone as in dead, or gone as in we don’t know where it is?”

“Just gone,” Serenus responded.

Clearly livid, Sam kicked off his shoes and entered the house, turning his back to his mother: Cassie wondered if he was afraid that he might hurt her if he stayed in the same room any longer. Serenus and Helen exchanged a look that Cassie couldn’t interpret.

She felt exhausted, but more importantly, she was filthy. “Hey, can I take a shower?” she asked. “I still feel like I have mud all over me.”

“I got next,” said Miri immediately.

“Fine,” said Helen. “Bathroom is on the left at the top of the stairs. After you shower, pick any hair out of the drain and throw it out, please.” She wrung some water out from the bottom of her soaking wet skirt, and followed her son into the house. “I’m going to order some pizza. I don’t order any toppings on it, so don’t ask.”

Cassie moved to go to the bathroom, when the now familiar tug on her arm stopped her. “Aeka, I’m just going to go get clean. You can shower after Miri if you want.”

The girl, who somehow only looked more beautiful with her face framed by windblown, wet hair, nodded and let go of her. Cassie raced into the house and up the stairs; she hadn’t realized until just then how badly she’d needed to get away from Aeka.

Like everything else in the house, the bathroom was small, but at least it looked very clean. Cassie started the water and quickly stripped down to her underwear, waiting for the shower to heat up. She looked at the worn, blue-striped shower curtain and wondered; if this was the house Sam had grown up in, was this where he had showered thousands of times?

I just found out I’m an angel, and what am I thinking about? Sam naked. Yaay, priorities!

Th
e
thing was, she couldn’t think about being an angel, even if she tried— her mind just wouldn’t accept it. That Aeka was an angel, she could believe; she had probably half-believed it before she even knew it was possible. But as far as she herself was concerned, she didn’t know if she believed it, if she rejected it, or what; she just couldn’t feel anything about it. It was like an abstract concept that didn’t seem to apply to her.

She moved to the shower and pulled the curtain back, feeling the water temperature with her hand. She sighed softly as the steam began to envelop her skin. She had already begun slipping her bra off when she sensed something.

She froze, heart skipping a beat: someone was in this room with her. Right behind her.

“Hey!” she yelped, whipping around quickly, covering herself protectively with her arms. Then her jaw dropped.
“You?! What are you doing here?”