Witchy Woman (12 page)

“What’s next?” Nate asked as they climbed into Tess’s Toyota Tercel in the hospital visitors’ lot.

“We have to find the Book of Shadows.”

“Is there any chance of that? After fifteen years? Surely whoever bought your mother’s house got rid of the book.”

“No one bought the house. It was on the market for a while, but it didn’t sell.”

“You mean you still own it?”

“Yes. It’s over in Sudbury. I suspect it’s still standing, if it didn’t burn down. I have the keys.” She jangled her keyring before inserting the car key into the ignition and starting the engine. “Are you game?”

“Sure.”

Now, as they turned off U.S. 90 and headed toward the town where Tess had grown up, her unease began to build. Nothing bad had happened to them all day—at least, nothing curse-wise. No car accidents or flat tires or injuries. Yet Tess couldn’t shake this feeling of impending tragedy. It was almost as if the Cat were resting up for bigger and better things.

Or maybe it was just Tess’s dread over facing her childhood home. She and Morganna had been relatively happy there once. But darker memories overshadowed the nicer ones. She hadn’t been back to the house since Child Protective Services had taken her away.

Nate had been quiet for most of the drive, perhaps picking up on her mood and matching it. She hadn’t been kidding about him being psychic. Of course, she believed that everyone had some extrasensory abilities. But Nate had a strong sensitivity to people that he probably wasn’t even aware of. It was what made him a good reporter, she imagined. His hunches would tell him whom to pursue and what questions to ask. His ability to match the mood or mind-set of anybody he
talked to would make him likable and cause others to open up to him, as she had done.

As Tess turned down her old street, with the incongruously innocent name of Apple Blossom Road, her anxiety increased. What had she gotten herself into? She’d been close to a nervous breakdown when she’d finally left this place. Was she going to regress right back to that state the moment she saw the house? Or just flip out completely and scare Nate to pieces?

Around the final turn, she held her breath. She would have closed her eyes, too, if she hadn’t been driving. God, there it was, in all its menacing glory. A faded “For Sale” sign, the phone number almost illegible, leaned in the front yard. She turned into the crushed-shell driveway and stopped the car.

“This is it, huh?”

Tess nodded. She forced herself to look at the house, to study it. Most of the windows were boarded up, and the shrubs and vines had grown out of control, but otherwise the structure appeared sound. It was just a house, two stories, white frame, a big front porch with pillars that had once looked inviting. Now it reminded Tess of a gaping mouth with teeth missing.

“You ready?” he asked. “If you don’t want to go inside, I’ll do it. Just tell me what to look for and where.”

“No, I’ll come,” she said, opening her door. She had to put one foot consciously in front of the other to advance her toward the house. She almost felt like she was wading through molasses.

Nate bounded up the front steps ahead of her, disturbing
a flock of pigeons having a siesta on the porch. “This is a great old house. I can’t believe it didn’t sell.”

“I can.” She didn’t need to elaborate. As soon as she twisted the key in the rusty old lock and pushed the door open, a sickly odor greeted them—the smell of dust and cobwebs, small dead things, disuse, and evil. Of course, Tess didn’t imagine that Nate interpreted the smell as she did. But judging from the way he recoiled, he found it repugnant.

He coughed. “God! How long has this place been closed up?”

“Years, I’m afraid.” She stepped gingerly over the threshold. The entrance-hall floor was littered with plaster that had fallen from the ceiling.

Nate flipped on a light switch. Nothing happened. “Too much to hope for, I guess. Are the walls … black?”

“Uh-huh. One of Morganna’s little idiosyncrasies.”

“Hmm.”

They moved into the living room. Most of her mother’s things were still there, covered in yellowed sheets that resembled ghosts in the half-light. Those things not draped were caked with dust. Nate gallantly broke through all the cobwebs ahead of Tess.

“Do you have any idea where to look?” he asked as they moved slowly through the room, their feet crunching against the debris-strewn wood floors.

“Not really. Morganna kept her grimoire hidden. It’s a very private thing, a Book of Shadows. She wouldn’t have wanted just anyone stumbling across it.”

“Including you?”

“Especially me. She said that without training, I could really make a mess of her spells.”

“Okay. Where do people hide things? How about under her bed?”

Tess shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

“Why don’t we split up? I’ll go upstairs—”

“No!” Panic rose hot in her throat. She decided not to put on a brave front. “Don’t you dare leave me here alone.”

“You’re scared?”

“Hell, yes. Aren’t you?”

“I’m a guy. Guys aren’t supposed to get scared.” He paused, looking around. “I’m uneasy, though. I’ll admit that. All this place needs is a few bats, and the Munsters would feel right at home. Is that a black candle?”

“Uh-huh. There’s a pentagram under the rug too. There used to be some really weird stuff, but I guess the real-estate people packed it away before putting the house up for sale. I remember they wanted us to have it repainted so it would bring a better price, but my guardian didn’t want to mess with it.”

“Who was your guardian?”

“An aunt. My father’s sister. She didn’t want me. I hardly saw her after I went away to college, and she died a few years ago. Still, living with her was better than living here.”

“Poor Tess,” Nate murmured.

She didn’t want him to feel sorry for her, she realized. Pity wasn’t something she was prepared to accept from Nate Wagner. She also realized she wanted something
else from him, something beyond his help with this magic business. She wasn’t sure what that something was, but it filled her with a yearning that was completely alien to her.

She felt a cold draft and shivered. “Let’s get to work. You’re right, we should split up. You go upstairs. I’ll start down here.”

“If you’re sure?”

She nodded. He lightly stroked her arm in a gesture of understanding, then jerked his hand back. “Sorry. I know you don’t like to be touched, but it’s sort of instinctual with me to reach out to you when you’re hurting.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. Please don’t.…” She was so confused, her throat hurt. She remembered what her mother had said, about how Tess never allowed anyone to touch her. She’d never before considered how her aversion to touch must have affected Morganna. It must have made her feel rejected, unloved, particularly because Tess never really explained it to her mother.

“You can touch me if you want,” she said now to Nate. Impulsively she grabbed his hand and brought it up to her face.
What am I doing?
She looked up into his eyes, and for a moment all else receded—the house and all it represented, the curse, everything. There were only the two of them in this great vacuum, with waves of warmth pulsating back and forth between them.

It was so amazing, how he made her feel, as if she were in a protective cocoon, or bathing in warm lotion. But it went beyond that. She felt a tingling deep in her
core, a hotness between her legs that wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly, but it made her want to squirm. Her palms went damp.

She was aroused. In this awful place, she was suddenly aware of herself as a woman as she had never been before.

She’d been aroused a few times in the past, so she recognized it. But the other times she’d been looking, not touching.

“I … I …” She couldn’t articulate anything. He came closer, and she realized with a sense of awe mingled with fear that he was going to kiss her.

He did. Her mind exploded with pleasure, expanding to take in every outward sensation—the texture of his mouth pressing insistently against hers, the firm warmth of his hand where it had slid behind her neck, the sound of Nate’s breathing, and the pounding of her own blood through her veins. The sensory overload effectively blocked out her psychic receptors. For a few moments more she reveled in the purely physical realm.

Then a fluttering sound overhead jerked her back to reality. She pulled away from Nate. “What was that?”

Nate was looking around, too. “A bat?”

“Oh, God, I hate bats. Let’s find the stupid book and get out of here.” She pulled away. He let her, though reluctantly, it seemed.

Since Tess knew the house better, she volunteered to face the upstairs. She rifled through her mother’s old closets, looked under the bed and in bureau drawers.
Everywhere were reminders of the nightmare her life had become—pictures and statues of demons, ceremonial bones and knives, religious symbols that had been reversed or otherwise perverted. There was almost no trace left of the beautiful, gentle magic Morganna had performed when she was plain old Mildred DeWitt.

Tess became almost numb from the constant onslaught of hideous vibrations. Yet she pressed on. The book had to be somewhere.

She heard a yelp from downstairs. She ran to the landing and called down to Nate, “Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he answered sheepishly. “Are you?”

“I’m okay. Any sign of the book?”

“No.”

When she finished searching the upstairs, she pulled down the attic stairs and climbed up, but all she found were a few dusty boxes with Christmas decorations that hadn’t been used in twenty years. Morganna didn’t believe in celebrating Christian holidays.

With no small amount of relief, Tess rejoined Nate downstairs. He was methodically checking the book titles on the shelves in the den.

“She wouldn’t have kept it here in plain sight,” Tess said.

Nate jumped. “Hey, don’t sneak up on me like that.” But he smiled at her.

“What made you yelp earlier?” she asked.

“Oh, that. I opened that closet over there, and something jumped out and tried to kill me. A devil or something. I wouldn’t recommend looking.”

But Tess was already drifting toward the closet. Something was teasing at her memory. She opened the door a crack. Two sightless eyes peered at her from the darkness.

“Oh, I remember!” She opened the door wider to reveal the stuffed head of a ram, complete with huge, curved horns. “It’s Ernie.”

“Ernie?”

“Mother bought him at a garage sale. He was our own private Horned God.”

“Horned … you mean like the devil?” Nate asked dubiously. He came to stand behind Tess and have another look at his nemesis.

“No. He’s one of the main deities of the ancient religion. The Catholic Church turned him into the devil back in the days when they were burning witches and heretics. But he’s not such a bad guy, just the Goddess’s consort. And …” Following a sudden flash of intuition, or maybe memory, Tess stepped away from the closet. “Would you mind lifting Ernie off the wall? Maybe he’s guarding something.”

“Sure.” Nate did as she’d asked, putting the ram’s head aside.

Tess stepped into the closet and started feeling around, pushing and prodding the plywood planks. Finally one of the boards gave a little under pressure, then sprang open.

“Eureka!” There was a thick, leather-bound book sitting in a niche, along with Morganna’s most sacred ceremonial tools—a knife, a silver chalice, a white candle, and a censer.

“What’s all that other stuff?” Nate asked, leaning into the closet to have a better look.

Tess resisted the urge to lean closer, to let just his hair brush her cheek. She was getting dangerously close to being obsessed with the idea of touching him. “Those are a witch’s basic tools. The knife, or athame, represents earth; the chalice, water; the candle, fire; and the censer, air. They’re used for almost all ceremonies.”

“Should we take them with us?”

Tess hesitated. “No. They’re Morganna’s personal tools. If we need anything like that, we can buy them new.”

“Okay.” Nate scooped the book up. Tess noticed that, unlike everything else in the house, the Book of Shadows was scrupulously clean, without even a speck of dust to mar the tooled-leather cover. It was as if the dust were afraid to land on it.

She nixed that thought. It’s just a book, she chanted silently. It can’t hurt me.

“Can we go now?” Nate asked. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some fresh air.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Nate put Ernie back into his dark home. Then, the two them moved fast to get out of the house.

Nate sat with the book on his lap while Tess drove back toward Boston, but he didn’t open it or make any comment about it for several minutes. He felt embarrassingly
uneasy about delving into Morganna’s private world of magic and mayhem.

He was also thinking about the kiss he’d shared with Tess, and what it meant. Was she thinking about it too? Or had the practicalities of their current predicament overridden a momentary, foolish burst of passion?

Well, he’d never been one to act coy. “Are you sorry you kissed me?” he asked, just to get the ball rolling.

She turned her startled blue eyes off the road and toward him for an instant. “No. Are you? Sorry you kissed me, that is.”

“No.” Well, that hadn’t gone much of anywhere.

“Look, Nate, I can’t think about that right now. It was a nice kiss—no, a great kiss, a fantastic kiss, but I can’t think about it right now. I need to be tranquil and clearheaded to work magic.”

A fantastic kiss.
He savored her words. What guy didn’t like to be told he was a great kisser? But apparently she wasn’t keen on repeating the experience anytime soon, not until she’d completed her “magic.” All the more reason for him to do everything he could to assist her.

Did that make him a sorcerer’s apprentice?

He opened the book. The pages were yellowed and brittle, but not crumbling. Still, he treated them gently. A number of names were inscribed in the flyleaf, the last being Morganna Majick. Oddly, the one above it was Mildred Hampton. “Was Hampton your mother’s maiden name?” he asked.