Something Wicked (11 page)

I had to shake my head. Of course I hadn’t.

It was Thea who explained further. “Long ago, twice a year, worshippers would make a pilgrimage from Kerameikos—the Athens community of the
kerameis,
or potters—along the Sacred Way to Eleusis. Perhaps…thirty kilometers? There they would celebrate the goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone.”

I felt relieved to actually recognize something. “Isn’t Persephone the daughter who gets kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld? And Mother Nature turns the whole world to winter because she’s so upset.”

Barely a month had passed since Diana’s death. I could
so
relate to the need to make others suffer for one’s pain, fair or not.

“But each year when Her daughter returns, spring comes,” said Eleni. “Yes, this is the legend.”

“The Greater Mysteries took place in the autumn,” Thea continued, stretching back more comfortably on her bus seat. “At harvest time, when Persephone and Demeter parted. The Lesser Mysteries took place in the spring, for their reunion. This continued for perhaps two thousand years, until the Christians outlawed it.”

“So…Eleusis
isn’t
a Hekate site?”

Eleni laughed at my ignorance. Luckily, she had a nice, Diana-like laugh that invited you to share the joke. “Hekate, she is the guide in the legend. The one who takes Persephone from her mother each autumn and returns her each spring.”

I looked out the window again, at the light edging toward sunset. The view of ugly factories and refineries was hardly inspiring. But I wasn’t in the mood to be inspired, either. I was hungry. I was hurting. I was tired. And even after a month, I was still very angry.

While Hekate might still take people away to the Underworld, it’s not like she ever gave them back anymore.

“So if we aren’t going for the grail, why
are
we driving to Eleusis?” I asked.

It was my cousin Eleni who answered. “Is it not time we asked Hekate what
She
wishes?”

And at that, I wasn’t quite as hungry or as tired. Sometimes the universe surprises you. This was it, the rest of the pilgrimage my
nonna
had suggested. This was my chance to ask Hekate how I could remove the curse from Ben! Except…

What if her answer was to cancel the curse entirely?

I thought of Victor licking his fingertips and smiling—
You cancel the damned curse
—and I knew I wouldn’t do it. Not in a thousand lifetimes. Not for my own safety, and not even for Ben’s. As long as I did nightly protection spells, he was safe enough. Right? Even if it
did
complicate that false, magical bond between us.

Still, maybe Hekate and I could work out something better. She owed me, if for nothing else than the snake.

I only wished the view of factories out the bus window, refineries on land that had once been sacred, weren’t such a grim reminder of man’s corruption of nature.

Of the Goddess.

V
ictor didn’t even hear the scooter coming. One minute he was limping along the Plaka—limping because he’d slipped and fallen on the path down from the Acropolis as he attempted to dodge Ben. He’d avoided his traitorous, bewitched brother, but wrenched his ankle. Damned curse.

The next minute, it felt as if someone shoved him hard enough that he flew four feet and crashed into a cluster of bistro tables and tall metal chairs. A woman screamed. Wine bottles smashed to the cobblestones beside Victor’s head, which hit ground as hard as it had that night when his parents died and the men in the black masks threw him against the wall.

The world closed briefly around him, going red, then negative, then resolving itself into normalcy. Or what had become horribly, painfully normal for him, this past month.

This was her fault.

Victor pushed himself unsteadily to his hands and knees. A waiter shouted at the biker. The biker gestured impatiently at Victor, as if to say it was the pedestrian’s fault for being in the way. Neither of them knew the truth about Kate Trillo’s damned curse.

Victor struggled to his feet, against bystanders’ protests. He knew he wasn’t hurt badly enough to need a hospital, because that wasn’t how the curse worked. The witch had wished him—him and Ben—a long, lingering death, not a fast one. She’d cursed them with years, not months, of misery. As if Diana’s defiance had been
his
doing.

No, the Trillo women were asking for it.

Waving away the Greek protests of the waiter, even of the biker, Victor limped on. Every step was grinding agony. Until Kate Trillo took off the damned curse…

Hadn’t she realized he was serious? Didn’t she grasp that he was the only reason she was still alive?

He
owned
her now! Once he had the cup and took up the mantle his parents had so stupidly thrown aside, he’d have more than enough power to make sure the witch paid. She liked her suffering slow, lingering? Victor had entertained himself with enough small animals during his youth to know he was up to meeting her every desire in that arena.

And then some.

After what felt like unending agony—were his ribs broken, or just bruised?—Victor reached his hotel, made it to the elevator without garnering too much attention and then to his room. He half sat, half fell onto his bed and found himself staring at his hands. Especially the one that had touched Kate Trillo’s bloody face, after he saved her worthless life. Her dark eyes had been wide, her olive complexion so pale….

And she was with his
brother?

The bitch had cast a spell on Ben, as surely as on Victor. But only Victor realized it. Nothing else explained how badly he ached for the little tramp, or why Ben would betray him—
him
—like this, except for magic. Her obvious love spell wasn’t why Victor had saved her. He’d done that so she could cancel out her curse and find his grail. But maybe…

Trying to catch his breath around his injured ribs, he pulled open the drawer beside the bed and pulled out a linen envelope. His hand shook as he used a business card to scrape dried flakes of Kate Trillo’s blood out from under his fingernails, into the envelope.

Vic didn’t know shit about black magic.

But he knew something about fighting fire with fire….

Picture the spookiest witches’ circle you can imagine. Waxing moon. Howling dogs. Dancing torchlight. Wind in the trees.

Now get rid of most of the trees, and add Greek ruins.

That was the three of us at Eleusis.

Demeter’s old sanctuary wasn’t up high like the Acropolis—which, considering my afternoon scare, was a good thing—but it was huge. In fact, some of it sat below ground level, where it had been excavated out of the scrubby hillside. Stone courtyards spread out at different levels in front of us, connected by roads lined with low walls. Square foundations marked the places where temples had once stood. Crumbling stairways, rounded from centuries of erosion, and columns broken off at different heights interrupted the unnatural openness of an area that should’ve had buildings, and roofs…and people.

The people who’d originally worshipped here had been dead for thousands of years. But I couldn’t help but imagine their ghosts still lingered, all around us.

Add to that the fact that we were officially trespassing, that the sun was setting and that dogs howled in the nearby hills, and I felt unnerved even before we reached a cave. “Look, I don’t want to go to a Greek jail,” I protested, but Eleni only laughed.

“My friend Dimitri knows we are here,” she assured me. “He is the head guard.”

My cousin seemed to know a lot of guards, didn’t she?

But apparently the site officially closed to visitors at three o’clock in the afternoon—“fifteen o’clock,” Thea had said—during winter hours. And what we meant to do didn’t exactly invite visitors or afternoon sunlight. So here we stood in the shadows, flouting legalities.

We stopped in front of a gaping cave—two large, black-stained arches into the hillside, like dark eyes. In front of it, grass and tiny yellow flowers grew over pitted, pale flagstones. Half a low wall fronted the space, and more stone blocks lay around, as if tossed there. A final block, newer, had Greek words carved on it. Thea said it called this place the Ploutonion, the mythical entrance into Hades, after the Roman version, Pluto, of the word
Hades
.

Wow. If Hekate lingered anyplace physical, it had to be here, right?

We spent time setting up our circle—three unlit torches, a heavily embroidered altar cloth spread out picnic-blanket style, and Eleni’s athame and goblet. I caught my breath when I saw the cup, it was so similar to Diana’s. But the differences were as clear as the resemblance. Same potter. Different pot.

She opened a jar and sloshed brown liquid into the goblet. “It is dandelion tea,” she informed me. “Not the hallucinogens of ancient priestesses.”

That was a relief, anyway.

She also set out plates of food, honey cakes and cheese and garlic. My stomach growled at the scent, but I knew from my training that this food was for after the ritual, and much of it would be for Hekate.

Thea helped me henna my good hand and the fingertips of my cast hand with sacred symbols. She drew a pentagram on both her palms, but I painted a lopsided
vesica piscis
on mine. Then she said, “This was once to symbolize blood,” and my stomach twisted.

More dogs set into howling, closer to us, just over the hill. A breeze kicked through the distant yew trees.

“She comes,” whispered Eleni with a smile, and my stomach turned another full twist. The sun had set, revealing a three-quarter moon in a denim-blue, darkening twilight sky. When we lit the torches, they danced and twisted in the breeze. Beyond us stretched the ruins of a long-dead sanctuary in a land that couldn’t help but feel foreign to me.

I could see why witchcraft scared so many outsiders—but it wasn’t supposed to be this scary for the witches, was it? Then again, the other witches seemed fine with it.

But none of them had probably been tossing curses around.

We started the ritual. First, we cast our circle, meaning we walked a slow circumference around our torches and altar cloth, marking out a physical boundary for ourselves and our magic this night. Then we called the quarters. Eleni, who started at the East, did so in Greek. But I could tell by how she spread her hands, and tipped her head back in the dark night, that she was asking the spirits of the East, the element of Air, to be with us.

Since I was in the right spot, I went next. “I call upon the spirits of the South, element of Fire, to harken to our circle. May we know your warmth, your courage. So mote it be!”

Thea went next, to call the West—in Greek—and Eleni finished with the North. That’s the benefit of ritual. Like hearing a Catholic service in Latin, you still catch the important stuff.

But I.

Felt.

Nothing.

Bupkis. Zip. Zed. Nada.

Tendrils of pale cloud fingered across the moon. Dogs still howled. A dust devil rose and spun past our ritual. The dark, gaping eyes of Pluto’s cave watched us with millennia of indifference.

I didn’t feel magic, or powerful, or wise. I felt no different at all. Except for feeling increasingly helpless, and frustrated at being helpless, I was unchanged.

This was as witchy as you could get without a trio of old hags stirring a cauldron and chanting “Bubble bubble toil and trouble”—or whatever it is that those witches chant—and
I was no different than before.

Hekate was giving me the cold shoulder.

We knelt on the uneven ground, each of us a point on a human triangle, inside our circle. We passed around the chalice of Eleni’s dandelion tea, sipping its odd, soothing flavor. Then we bowed our heads to make our own silent entreaties to the Lady—as if She would even listen. And I’d never felt so alone. Not even—

“Hello, Miss Pouty Pants. How’s it hanging?”

I looked up from my meditation, startled. And there stood Diana, alive as can be, her hands planted on her hips. I considered reaching across and nudging Eleni—both she and Thea had their heads bent in prayer—but if Diana wasn’t real, then having Eleni look would confirm that. And I guess I didn’t want it confirmed.

“Hi,” I whispered, like I used to whisper to my best friend in school, hoping the teacher wouldn’t hear.

Diana laughed.
“Don’t sweat it, this is trance time. They won’t notice. So come on, spill. What’s this latest crisis of faith all about?”

It didn’t help that she held up her hands and made finger quotes around the words “crisis of faith.”

“Hello? I almost fell off the freaking Acropolis.”

“Yeah. That rocked.”
She widened her eyes at my expression.
“Okay, one? It’s not like you didn’t survive. And two? I’m already dead. Dying? Not so big a deal anymore. So is that it?”

“Is that
it?
Di, the man who murdered you has our YaYa’s chalice. He wants me to help find an even older one, for who knows what reasons. He warned me not to trust Ben—I think—and even though that should probably be a ringing endorsement for Ben, considering the source, I’m still worried. And…this!” I swept my arm out, to indicate the other two witches. “I don’t belong here. I don’t
get it!
”

She shrugged.
“If you say so.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Hello?”
And yes, she was mocking me.
“Magic 101, remember? We create reality through our thoughts. If you think you don’t belong, you probably won’t. If you say you don’t belong, you really won’t. Hell, Katie, why not make it rhyme, just to be absolutely sure?”

“You think I’m
choosing
to make this hard?”

“On some level, yeah! You always have. How many times do I have to tell you? Tina Sutherland’s hair was not your fault!”

I stared at her. I blinked, tensing. I asked, “Who?”

“Don’t tell me you can’t remember. Second grade? Tina Sutherland? She had long, red, curly, Felicity-hair, and she lorded it over you like she was Queen of the World.”

I spread my fingers and shrugged. “Nothing.”

But was it really nothing, or was the tension in my neck, in my shoulders, calling me a liar?

Diana plopped down on a broken-off column, eyebrows rising.
“Interesting! You really are in denial.”

“Di! What does this have to do with anything?”

“Okay, keep in mind that I only got this secondhand. I was starting junior high by then, thank you very much. But for a couple of weeks, you couldn’t stop griping about Tina Sutherland and her hair. You used to mock how she would toss it over her shoulder.”
She mimicked the action.
“You even asked Mom if you could dye your hair red, and she said you’d have to bleach it first, and over her dead body.”

I still didn’t remember, but thank goodness. Me with red hair instead of black would just be…wrong.

“So on the day the school pictures came in, you came home crying, and you begged me not to tell Mom, and I asked you what’s up.”

“I remember the picture,” I admitted slowly—it’s not like my mother and aunt and grandmothers didn’t have all my school pictures, no matter how awful, displayed somewhere in their home. “I hated that picture.”

My hair had been in braids, but one of them had slid half out, and I’d looked lopsided. My throat began to close at the very thought of it…which should have been odd, what with it being
seventeen years ago.

“Yeah, well, that’s not why you were crying. Sure, you hated the picture. And you hated that Tina’s pictures turned out like some little fashion model’s. But what really bothered you was that…you’d touched her hair? I didn’t quite get that part either, but it started this whole…”

But I was starting to remember that, too. I didn’t want to, but I was. I’d had the seat behind Tina. The autumn was unusually warm that year, and the air-conditioning wasn’t running, so the school windows were open. A box fan wedged into one of them tried to cool the whole room. Tina’s auburn curls kept shifting, shifting, in that artificial breeze, like something magical. And I’d felt so envious, I’d reached out and touched one of those gleaming curls….

Hey, I’d only been eight.

But my finger caught in her hair, and she’d spun on me.
Ow! Keep your greasy hands off me, you dirty little dago!

“She insulted Dad,” I whispered now. Because to insult my Italian side was, of course, to insult my father. “But why would that make me cry? Why didn’t I just punch her?”

“You tried. She dodged and tattled. You had to stay in during recess.”