The Witch and the Huntsman (8 page)

“
And by the way, Millicent really, really doesn’t like Eric. She totally disapproves of my having any kind of relationship—keeps warning me against him.” I leaned back against the hard paneled wall beside the bed.

“
Not against
him
, Allison! Against your falling in love with him. That road can only lead to heartbreak—and great danger for all of us
...
”

“
Was that Millicent whispering in your mind just then?” asked Sam. “Wow, that felt so weird—it sort of
tickles
. It’s strange, but when she’s inside you, it’s like I can feel her presence there, too. It makes me almost remember her, you know?”

I knew. Like me, Sam is blocked by rebirth from remembering our history as a group together. But unlike me, whose senses become more open every day to recalling pieces of my past lives, her block is permanent because of her vampirism.

Of course, that grants her many other powers I can never have. Like eternal life, for one.

“
I’ll see you when you get back, okay? Stay safe, Allie—and call me if you need me. Remember, I can drop by any time.”

I smiled at that. As a vampire, Sam had the power of flight. In her winged state, she looked like a giant, monstrous bat, and it was really hard to see any sign of her humanity. It was actually a pretty terrifying sight, but I knew she would be there for me if I got into trouble, and that was a very reassuring feeling. Not to mention, she had recently learned to teleport. True story.

And don’t ask.

I went into the bathroom to take a shower. And almost fainted from shock. A very pale, very naked woman was standing there, gazing into the bathroom mirror. For one wild second I thought it was Marisa returned from the dead. Because my next realization was that I was seeing a ghost; the young woman’s skin flickered in and out of the solid world.

“
Millicent
!” I said, finally recognizing her. “You look so young. And so...naked. What happened to your dress?”

“
The moon is still very weak,” she said. “I’m trying to read traces of Marisa’s immediate past from her possessions, but I can’t see anything. It’s as if they have somehow been wiped clean of her presence.”

I, on the other hand, was seeing too much. Of Millicent, I mean. I was used to her as an old ghost in a Victorian gown or even an attractive fully-dressed middle-aged lady, but this new, party-girl-gone-wild look of hers was spooking me out just a teeny bit.

I turned and went back into the other room.

She was there now, too, running her astral fingers up and down Marisa’s parka. “You have made this yours, as well,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed, Allison—now you see me as I really am. A young girl at the height of her powers. Her powers to bewitch.” Her hair turned a brilliant red briefly, as she came to life—then faded back to a white ghostliness. But she was right; she had been pretty amazing-looking. I was just grateful Eric couldn’t see her right now.

She smiled. “Thanks for that thought, dear. It’s true men used to fall in love with me in the old days. They made such fools of themselves over all three of us! Unlike you, I always preferred the steady love of a good man and the role of mother, not temptress. Something has changed for me now, though. Do you know where I normally draw my powers from to manifest myself like this, Allison?”

“
From the moon?”

“
From moon—
and
earth. Mother Gaia must give her consent for me to walk upon her again. But now I sense a third source, so great that I may soon be able to take solid physical form here at times, just as my dear son did in the throes of his grief.”

“
And what is this new source?”

Millicent walked over to my bed and pulled the blanket from it, then draped it around herself. I blinked. There were two blankets now; one was the etheric double of the first.

“
You
,” she said. “I think I’ve begun to act as a kind of psychic vampire lately without being able to control it, drawing on your life-force, your ethereal energy, just as Sam has done all these months by feasting on your blood.” Her tone was disapproving; Millicent hated vampires, even though I knew she still felt love for Sam. “I think that as Sam wants less and less from you, your need to nurture is slowly bringing me not to life itself, but to a more lifelike form whenever I choose to materialize. A form that not only you but others can also see.”

“
So what you’re saying is that you’re taking Sam’s place.”

Millicent nodded. She was looking more alive and real by the minute. The red in her long unkempt mane of hair was brighter than ever, and I could see freckles on her skin. For the first time, I noticed that her eyes were bright green, like a cat’s.

“
In every way. A triad has its own natural equilibrium, but when our sister-witch Sam abandoned us, that delicate balance was lost.”

Have I mentioned that Millicent loved big words? I guess that was because she’d never been reborn in the modern age—her last life had ended like back in the nineteen-seventies or something. Like,
prehistory
.

“
Well, now we have a third sister-witch again,” I said firmly. “Ivy texted me earlier. She says the shoot is wrapping tomorrow, so she’s going to fly up here stat. I guess maybe you’ll be able to draw from her ethereal energy, too. Now, for crying out loud, will you please let me do something about your hair! It’s driving me crazy.” I paused. “Now, can ghosts do styling conditioner?”

Chapter Eleven

That night, I was woken up from a bad dream by strange noises. But for a minute, I stayed trapped in the dream, which was about being hunted in the dark by monsters with the heads of animals like wolves and mountain lions and even stags and elks with savage teeth.

Except when I opened my eyes, my heart racing and pounding in my chest, I still heard the same sounds of pursuit as in the nightmare—blaring hunting horns and howling off in the distance. I sat straight up in bed and saw by the faint glow from the window that the new, red-haired, witch-girl version of Millicent was sleeping on the floor beside me on a mattress that was obviously a psychic echo of the one I was sleeping on. As I stared in surprise at the sight of her, her eyes shot wide open.

“
Ghosts can sleep?” I said.

“
This body seems to need a lot of it. I’d forgotten about bodies. But I couldn’t leave you here alone and unprotected, Allison—I hope you don’t mind my watching over you in this way.” If being sound asleep was watching over me...

“
Nope, it’s just like a slumber party,” I said, clambering over her to go look out the window. I had the weird feeling that if I accidentally stumbled, I might put a foot through her. But her hair had felt real when I combed it out earlier.

Meanwhile, the noises outside were coming closer. And when I went to the window, I could see tiny bobbing pinpricks of light stabbing the darkness way off in the trees.

“
The Wild Hunt
,” Millicent said in my ear. She had appeared suddenly beside me at the window; in spite of her new, more or less solid physical state, she still had this habit of just moving from place to place like her own version of teleportation. For example, she never used the bathroom door—she just showed up in one room or the other. It was kind of unsettling, and I wished I could think of a tactful way to ask her not to do it anymore. At least I had her wearing the ghost of one of my T-shirts to sleep in.

I noticed that my breath made a little frosty patch on the window, but this new Millicent’s didn’t. When her bare arm brushed against mine, her skin felt even colder to the touch than Sam’s.

“
What’s the Wild Hunt?” I asked her.

“
It began in prehistory when demons and their hellhounds, along with the spirits of the dead, would hunt at Samhain, what we now call Halloween. Their horses would race across the sky or just above the ground, leaving no tracks, and the noise of their passage was heard as thunder. Their prey was most often human folk—or witches like us.” She shivered. “It’s a mercy that you cannot remember it, child, but we three were hunted by these horrible creatures several times over the centuries. Once in Bavaria, once in Scotland, and the last time just outside Salem, Massachusetts. We were trying to escape from the witch trials.”

Okay, now I was getting spooked out.

“
You think they’re hunting a real
person
out there right now?”

“
Yes.”

Suddenly things dawned on me. “So that’s what happened to Marisa...?” I know,
duh
, right?

She nodded. “I fear so.” She touched my hand, her fingers like ice. “Try to remain detached from this vile business, Allison. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it happening—it’s too late.”

Now it was my turn to tremble, and Millicent put her arms around me consolingly.

“
But the victim—whoever it was—was in my mind a minute ago! In my dreams,
I
was the one being hunted...who...who is it? Do you know?”

She shook her head. “Never fear; with your psychic talents, you will find out soon enough. But for now, try to shield your thoughts, as I’ve taught you to do. Hush now—don’t fret, dear. There’s nothing either of us can do. At least the end will be swift.” She laughed bitterly. “You and I, of all people, should know that...”

I stared at her in horror. “You mean… They
caught
us?”

She nodded. “Yes. All three times. But our spirits were too strong for them to keep captive; we have all three been reborn many times since then.” She gave me the ghost of a smile. Or, in her case, a regular smile. “And now we’ve even reunited, after a fashion. See? Death, where is thy sting?”

Even though the sounds and the flickering lights diminished and disappeared, I still didn’t get much sleep the rest of the night. Dawn couldn’t come too soon, as far as I was concerned—and after it did, I gave up trying to doze and got up and took a shower. Then I dressed and went for a long walk along the ski trails up the mountainside, looking for traces of last night’s hunt. I’d heard horses, or things that sounded like horses, and in my dream, the horned demons had been riding on horses and some kind of animals like huge goats or rams, but I saw no hoof prints in the snow. Or droppings or ashes from the torches they all carried.

Maybe it had all just been a bad dream.

Or maybe not. Just like before, I kept having the feeling I was being watched, and I kept noticing what I thought were shadows stalking me from deep in the fir trees. So I wasn’t exactly paying attention when I almost bumped into a man standing as still and silent as a statue on one of the ski trails.

“
Sorry, Allison,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

My eyes adjusted to the sunlight, and I was flooded with a terrific sense of relief.

“
Eric! Wow, am I glad to see you. But what are you doing out on the slopes so early?”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I thought I heard you taking a hunting party out late.”

His face broke into a smile, and my knees almost buckled at the sight. Was I ever smitten. But I wasn’t so smitten that the witchy part of me wasn’t still busy reading his aura when he answered. Because it was kind of a trick question.

“
A few of the guests got pretty wasted and wanted to come after the nocturnals.” He looked sheepish. “It’s a service we offer, and I couldn’t exactly say no. I guess they must have made a lot of noise—and all we ended up bagging was a couple rabbits and a pole-cat. But we broke it off pretty early.”

He’d started moving while he talked, and I turned so we could walk back side by side.

“
It was a funny thing, though. I kept having this feeling like I’d left a few of the guests behind or something. You know? Like there were more hunters out there in the night or something. And I kept hearing weird noises from up the mountain—so I didn’t end up getting much sleep. Restless night. So I figured, why not get up early and check the hunting blinds out, just to make sure everything was kosher? Glad I did—or I wouldn’t have run into you.” He glanced over at me and smiled.

The whole time, I was keeping an eye on his aura, and it was what we professional psychics with the gift of sight call ‘occluded.’ In other words, it was just like yesterday when we first were alone together; his colors were radiant when they flowed from his etheric or astral spirit, which showed that he was as amazing on the inside as he was on the outside. But then, after it projected a certain distance from his body ‘mantle,’ Eric’s aura darkened and turned inward again. I’d never seen anything like it before. Maybe Millicent could tell me what it meant.

But I knew something wasn’t right.

To cover my confusion, I kind of babbled at him, asking him questions about how long he’d been here and whether he got along okay with his stepmom. To, you know, try to figure out whether or not he was really having a thing with her, like Kev and Brittany seemed to assume.

“
Sure,” said Eric in reply to my question about his stepmother, and his aura did that weird thing again. “It’s been good having her here. And I think she was good for my dad.”

“
You don’t sound German like her,” I said.

“
Austrian. But yeah, I guess I am. We came over when I was twelve, though. Back when my mom was still alive—she died about ten years ago. Then my dad married Regina.”

I was hoping his answers would also give me some kind of clue about how old he was, because I totally could not tell, but no such luck. My best guess was he was just pushing thirty, which would make him six or seven years younger than me.

Which could have been a deal-breaker, but somehow wasn’t. Let’s face it, the chemistry between us was just too awesome. So it looked like the Oregon mountain lion—not to mention Regina Jaeger—wasn’t the only cougar roaming the Cascades these days.