If the Broom Fits (7 page)

He took my arm and pulled me closer.

“What are you doing?” I leaned away from him.

“Just in case someone's looking out the window, it's best to look like we're just out here enjoying the snow.”

I took a deep breath and tried to relax, though the cold air burned my lungs. “Did Rhonda have family?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of.” He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a sort of sideways hug. “I don't see anyone. Make it fast.”

“What?”

“Unlock the door.” He nudged me toward a tiny house nestled amongst some trees while he pretended to look down the street. It was so small I almost missed it.

I tried the door. It was locked. Of course. Katrina should have come. I knelt down in front of the lock and put my hands over it. I could do this. I thought of the spell and focused my energy. Nothing. “Damn it,” I whispered.

“Donavan, is that you?” an older sounding man called out.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Just out checking the roads.”

“Do you think we'll have a paper in the morning?”

“Doesn't look good,” Donavan said easily. “How is Amelia?”

I blocked them out and tried again. Holding my breath and pushing with everything I had, a head rush hit me hard and fast, almost knocking me over.

Click.

My hand shook as I reached out and tried the knob. It worked. I pushed the door open and ducked inside.

Holy crap it worked.

I
felt
around in the dark cellar for a light. Nothing.

I took off my gloves. Regular magic didn't come as intuitively to necromancers as death magic did. I had to learn the other kind and Selene and the coven were my first teachers. But I had been practicing this particular light spell. I could do it. I rubbed my hands together until they were warm, then held my left palm up and hovered my right hand over it, focusing on creating light between the two.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
The light started as a pinprick and slowly grew until it was the size of a baseball. I lifted my left hand into the air as high above my head as I could reach (almost to the ceiling) and left the ball of light there to illuminate the cellar.

The glow didn't reach all the way to the far corners, but it went deep enough to get an idea of what filled the space. Mostly cobwebs, spiders, and long forgotten storage. Wooden boxes of canning jars were stacked on one side. A few pieces of broken furniture lay scattered around the room. But nothing screamed witch or showed hints that anyone had been down here.

I brushed a cobweb out of the way as I went deeper into the room, and flicked my wrist to move the light so I could see all the way to the back wall. And that was where things suddenly got interesting.

On the stone wall there was a door drawn in a chalk like substance. It was crooked and jagged in spots, but definitely a door. All around it were scrawled symbols that looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn't read them. They radiated magic. If only I hadn't left my phone in the car, I could have taken a picture. Or even if Leslie had come with me. She was so much better at witchcraft than I was.

A shadow shifted or darkened or changed in some way because it caught my notice. I moved the light to the area and went over, but nothing was there. At least nothing I could see. I had lived in the Abyss long enough to know that if something didn't want to be seen, there was always a way to hide, especially from human eyes. My undead alarm buzzed beneath my skin. Probably a ghost of some sort, maybe something darker. It was hard to say. I searched the spot a bit more, then gave up and refocused on the symbols, committing as many of them to memory as I could before I headed back up to the house.

“I almost sent out a search party of one,” Leslie said with a yawn when I came back inside. “Did you find anything?”

“Maybe.” I described the cellar and the door to her.

She declined my offer to draw the runes and stood up instead. “Just take me there.” She shrugged into her heavy coat, pulled her wool hat over her dark blond hair, and slipped on mittens.

“I also saw someone outside.”

She looked up. “Really? Did you talk to them? Was it a neighbor?”

“I don't know. She asked what I was doing at the winter witch's house and tried to appear threatening. I called her bluff and ran her off, but she said she would be back. I don't really think it's anything we need to worry about though.”

Leslie frowned. “About how old was she?”

“Around our age, I guess. Maybe younger. What does that matter?”

Leslie's eyebrows knit together as she scanned the field around the house one more time. “We don't know anything about this farm—and a ‘celestial body' telling you that you inherited this house won't stand up in court. It could actually belong to someone else now or at least the bank. It isn't like you have been paying a mortgage or taxes on it. Also someone has been keeping up the property. All of the fields were mowed this fall because there's no grass or weeds sticking up above the snow. In fact, everything looks as well kept as if someone is actually living here. Well, except the covered furniture. Plus the key you have doesn't fit anything in this house—or that we know of.” Her mouth twitched. “How many people do you think knew your mother was a dark witch?”

“I don't know. I assume it wasn't a secret. At the very least Corbin knew.” I hadn't spoken to the vampire since before Christmas and I was completely okay with that. I had humiliated myself with him enough for one lifetime. He could just stay gone. “When I asked if he knew my mother he said he did.”

Leslie nodded. “Then who knows who has been visiting here. Other dark witches might try to seek her guidance or feed on her power. Her coven may still be using the house. Things are a bit dusty, but everything still works, including the lights. That's weird. Someone is footing the bill for all of this. It's likely that we are the ones actually trespassing.”

She was right. And to make matters worse, all of those things were things I should have noticed. My head was too far out of this game. All I'd been able to think about was my past and Orion since I started this trip. I had to get my shit together before I got us killed. “I introduced myself as Winter's daughter and the woman had no idea I was a necromancer. If she does belong to a coven, they're only a coven in practice, not in magical ability.”

Leslie took a deep breath and her shoulders relaxed. “At least that's something. Let's take a look at this door.”

Back in the cellar everything was just how I had left it, even my light was still going. I smiled a little at my achievement.

Leslie and I went to the door. “Can you move the light closer?” she said, leaning in close to the wall to look at the faded writing. “It's familiar, isn't it?”

I kept my attention on the shadows this time, not trusting whatever was hiding in them. “Yeah, I swear I've seen something like it before.”

She scratched her forehead. “Don't know that it's still active, though. I don't feel much coming off of this.”

I blinked. “Really? I do. The magic in here feels powerful to me.”

She straightened back to standing. A smile spread over her face. “Of course.” But then the smile vanished and she backed away a step. “Oh. That's probably bad then.”

I wasn't following at all. “What? Use your words.”

Her gaze darted to the corners of the room then back to me. “You sense something else in here too, don't you?”

My eyes flickered to the deep shadow beyond us. “We're not alone if that's what you mean.”

Leslie produced a ball of light in the blink of an eye that made mine look as dim as a firefly and tossed it to the other side of the room. There was nothing in sight. “Shadows,” she said. “They're guarding the door or at least feeding off it. She must have opened it to a negative place and they came through. They're scavengers and they feed on negative energy. Mostly, they are harmless, but if they get strong enough, they could be a nuance.”

I looked back and with the brighter light in the room I saw something I had missed before: bloodstains on the floor. It didn't look like just one either, but many separate puddles in various spots in front of the doorway. “I remember where I saw the runes,” I said.

“Where?”

“On the Pole of Charon,” I said. “Why, what were you thinking?”

“That makes sense. I was thinking if you could sense magic and I couldn't, it was death magic, but then—” she stopped herself midsentence.

“But then that's bad.”

“That's not exactly how I meant it,” she said. “But yeah. The Pole of Charon makes sense.”

“Finish what you were saying.”

“The Pole of Charon makes sense because it was from the underworld and Charon used it to transport spirits to Hell. That's the same sort of magic you possess. So wherever this door opens to, we have to assume it's something in the underworld, which supports the idea that someone was performing dark magic here. The question is, what was she letting in?”

“What makes you think she wasn't sending something away?”

Leslie pointed at the blood. “You don't need a blood sacrifice to banish something to the underworld. That's how we sent Corbin. But to get something from there over to here, you do. That's why it's dark magic.”

“Well, it's no big mystery. Obviously it was my mother.”

Leslie nodded. “At the very least. Probably others too. I can't imagine that she could have opened a doorway to the underworld by herself, multiple times. However, we still don't know why she did it. Maybe some of the bloodstains or runes are from her coven trying to get her back.”

“I don't really care why she did it. How do we make sure the doorway stays closed?”

Leslie took a deep breath. “Well, we could do a cleansing and paint over the wall to seal it, but another one could be created anywhere. It doesn't look like this one has been used recently. And I think
why
matters. It totally matters. If you look at any of our actions over the past few years they could be construed as bad, but seen as a whole you can see how good our intentions were. Jessica and you even used black magic to help us a couple times. Nothing exists in a bubble. With all light comes darkness. They are both in all of us.”

I thought back over everything Orion had told me when I first met him. “Orion mentioned something about she might have fallen to the darkness when she tried to get my father back after he died. That she wanted me to have a father. But that's the stupidest excuse I ever heard.”

Leslie's eyebrows shot up. “Is it?”

I scowled. “Yes. Would you choose to curse your unborn child to a life alone, of never being touched, all so she wouldn't grow up with one parent. I mean in the grand scheme of things that was some pretty terrible planning.”

Leslie stared at the doorway. “How did your mom meet Orion?”

“He said she summoned him when she was young.”

She nodded. “I think we need to learn more about what happened between them before we can understand what any of this was or what we should do about it.”

“Let's just cleanse it, close it, and find the Book of Shadows so we can get out of here.”

A gust of wind blew hard enough to slam the cellar door closed.

Leslie jumped and shivered. “We'll talk more in the house. These shadows are creeping me out.”

The storm had picked up to the point it was once again hard to see. The wind sucked the door shut behind us as we came into the house. Leslie took off her hat and shook out her hair. “I don't think Orion is going to let you leave whether or not you find the book. I believe he has a plan for you and I'm afraid you don't have a lot of choice in the matter.”

My teeth clenched together. “He can't stop me.”

The wind howled around the old windows. “Did you not notice the blizzard out there? I think we're entirely at his mercy right now.”

The sky had been gray all day, but night was getting closer and there was absolutely no way we could drive out of here after dark. “If he wants me to do something or discover something, why doesn't he just tell me? I'm sick of these games. What am I supposed to see? We've looked all over the house. There's nothing here.”

“Maybe that's the point,” she said. “Look, I'm not saying you're wrong about your mom. I really don't know. But if it were my mother, I'd take a second look. Something tells me the door is just the tip of the iceberg. Secrets are buried here. They're not on display.” She headed over to stand in front of the fireplace.

A dull ache started at the base of my skull. All of this was such a waste of my time, but then again, what else was I supposed to do stuck in here during a blizzard? I tried to push away the emotion that was obviously clouding my judgement.

I joined Leslie by the fire and stood shivering to the bones in front of it. The flames flickered and licked up as if stretching toward freedom. The blues and oranges and yellows crackled together over the blackened logs. I felt like that in my chest. All the things I wanted silently burning and consuming me, as I stood frozen on the outside. People thought I didn't feel, but I felt everything, I just didn't show it. “Looking through those boxes, did you see any pictures?”

Leslie shook her head.

“Me either. Isn't that strange? Don't most people have pictures?” Pictures weren't actually something I had either, so it didn't jump out at me right away, but thinking impartially, most people had them. All of the coven members had pictures up all over their houses and every time I saw them they had new pictures to show me on their phones. It seemed to be what people did. They documented their lives in a way that almost said, “I am here. This is my life.”

“I guess it depends on the person,” Leslie said, carefully laying her scarf, mitts and coat down near the flame to dry them. “But, yeah, I think most people have at least a few photos.”

I nodded. So we had boxes of normal things, bizarre overly witchy decorations on display, but no pictures and a key that didn't fit any of the doors. What did that all lead to? “This isn't her house,” I said.

“What?”

“I think that's what Orion wants me to see. This isn't my mother's house. He keeps saying I have some sort of connection to her. Well, I don't feel any sort of link here—except in the baby room. The rest of this is just a front. It was what she wanted the world to see or something. I don't know. Could it be an illusion?”

Leslie shook her head. “I don't think so, but you could be onto something. Orion definitely wanted you to see your room.”

The baby room had been the only door that was shut in the entire house. He opened it, not me. I took off for the stairs, pretty certain we had closed it behind us. When I reached the hallway upstairs, he was already leaning against the doorframe, waiting for me with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Move,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow, but didn't budge. “Why?”

“I want to see the room.”

“I showed you it,” he said, not moving.

I shook my head. “You showed me what you thought I wanted to see. You showed me what you thought would make me doubt what I know to be true. You showed me your version of the truth.”