The Water Witch (12 page)

The woman handed me a piece of flannel wrapped around a chunk of ice. I placed it gingerly against the bump and looked at her. She sat in a rocking chair in front of a woodstove, limned in murky light that turned her silver hair greenish gold. In the shadowy light, her face looked younger than it had outside. She was wearing a red wool cardigan appliquéd with snowmen over a plaid flannel shirt over red long johns and a long wool skirt. A heavy outfit for a summer day, but then old people were often cold. Plastic sheeting was taped over most of the windows to keep out drafts and a fire was roaring in the woodstove. The room itself looked like it was melting. Long strips of wallpaper hung from the walls, revealing multiple layers of floral patterns. Plaster was curling off the ceiling, and the wide plank floorboards were buckled and wavy. There was a scrabbling noise coming from the ceiling that I suspected might be mice.

“You dragged me out of the water?” I asked.

“Couldn’t let you drown, even if you were trying to steal my Aelvestone.”

Aelvestone. I liked the sound of that. I looked around the room for it.

There was no shortage of stones. Piled on every surface were smooth, rounded river stones, along with pieces of polished driftwood and other flotsam and jetsam that I imagined
the old woman had salvaged from the river: shards of broken glass that had been worn milky by their tumble over the rocks, bits of rusted metal twisted by the currents, and enough broken china to make a tea service for twelve. But no Aelvestone.

“I have her safe, or safe as can be. The Aelvesgold works its way with folks—different ways with different folks—but never for good. Most regular folk don’t see it.” She leaned forward in her rocker and squinted at me. Her face
did
look younger than it had before. “But you ain’t regular folk, are you?”

“I have a feeling neither are you,” I replied, wincing at the sharp pain in my head as I tried to sit up straighter. “My name’s Cailleach McFay. I work at the college. And you are …?”

“You mean you don’t know?” She laughed, which turned into a hacking cough. She spat into a cloudy-looking mason jar and wiped her mouth on the cuff of her flannel shirt. “You must be new to the town not to have heard the story of Lura Trask.”

“Trask?” The name was familiar. I searched my brain until I recalled the story Soheila had told me in the woods about the fisherman who had fallen in love with an undine. “Are you Sullivan Trask’s daughter?”

She made a hoarse noise of agreement and spit into the jar again.

“Then your mother …” Lura gave me a sharp warning look, but I persevered. “Your mother was an undine.”

Lura scowled. “And what if she was? What’s it to you?”

“Nothing—it’s just that I didn’t know that undines could have … 
human
children.”

“How do you know I’m human?” she asked with a wicked grin. Then when I didn’t answer, she slapped her knee and
guffawed. “I reckon I’m half human, but say …” She looked at me suspiciously. “How do
you
know about the undines in the first place?”

“I helped the other undines find the way into Faerie yesterday.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked out the only window that wasn’t covered with plastic. It gave a glimpse of the river flowing fast and glinting in the late afternoon sunlight. I must have been unconscious for some time.

“I heard them going,” she said, staring into the fire. “I knew it was the day … and that they had to go …”

“They were your sisters,” I said, putting together the bloodlines and realizing that if Lura really was the daughter of the undine who had seduced Sullivan Trask then she must be close to a hundred years old. “Of course you’d miss them.”

She made a harsh noise. “Miss them? Hardly. They kept me up half the nights with their singing. They’d swim down here and tangle my fishing lines and steal my bait. Silly, mindless creatures. Good riddance, I say.”

She got up and grabbed an iron poker. For a moment I was afraid she was going to hit me with it, but she shoved it in the woodstove instead, stirring up a flurry of sparks that flew into the air and singed the drooping wallpaper. It was a wonder that she hadn’t already burned down the place.

“Well, you’ll be happy to know then that there might not be any more undines coming here. The Grove wants to close the door …”

Lura turned on me, the poker raised menacingly. “They can’t do that! The undines must return to this river to spawn or they’ll die out.”

“I thought they were silly, mindless creatures,” I pointed out, “and that you were glad to see them gone. Why do you care if there aren’t any more, especially …”

“Especially as I’m not going to be around much longer?” She lowered the poker and gave the fire one more angry stab. Sitting back down, she looked into the flames and grew silent. The reflection of the firelight gave her skin the momentary flush of youth and I saw that she’d once been pretty. “I’m not afraid to die,” she said after a while, “but to think I’m the last of my kind … Well, that’s not the way I want to leave this world, even if it hasn’t always been a world that’s been kind to me.”

I wondered what the world had done to her that she’d chosen to live alone in this decaying house with only her half-human sisters for company. Looking at her, small and worn down as one of the river stones she collected, I felt the weight of all the years she had spent here alone. This house seemed infected with sadness, as if the wallpaper and plaster were peeling under its burden. A small, mean voice inside me sang,
This is what happens to you when you don’t love anyone
.

“Well, I’m going to try to stop them along with a circle of … friends.”

“Ha! A circle, eh? You must mean them witches and fairies? They don’t know what they’re doing most days. They come to me sometimes pretending they want my advice when all they really want is my Aelvesgold.”

“You mean you have more Aelvesgold than that stone?”

“Why would I tell you?” she asked suspiciously.

“Hey,” I said, holding up my hands. “I just learned about the stuff. My friends said the only reliable supply of it came from Faerie.”

Lura snorted and spat in the mason jar. “Your friends are ignorant. When an undine lays her eggs, she lays an Aelvestone with ’em to keep ’em safe till they hatch. The one you found must’ve been with the undines you brought over to Faerie, so it belonged to my sisters. Why should I share it?”

“Because we need the Aelvesgold to give us the power to keep the door open,” I said.

Lura screwed up her face, taking away any remnant of the beauty I’d just glimpsed. She reached her hand into her cardigan pocket and pulled out the Aelvestone. I caught my breath at the sight of it and had to restrain myself from leaping up and grabbing it. She leaned forward and held it up between her thumb and forefinger, as if teasing me with it.

“If I give you this, how do I know that you’d use it to keep the door open? How do I know you won’t use it to close the door?”

“Because I’m a doorkeeper,” I said without thinking. “It’s my job to open the door. If the Grove closes it forever …” I thought of Soheila and Diana being forced to chose between this world and Faerie. I thought of Liz growing old and dying without the benefit of Aelvesgold. I thought of never seeing Liam again … which shouldn’t matter because I’d already made my peace with not seeing him again. So why did my whole body feel as if it had been hollowed out? I think it was that hollowness that Lura saw in my eyes, perhaps because it was the same emptiness I’d seen in hers.

She nodded, spat again, tossed the stone up in the air, and caught it. My eyes followed its progress like a dog watching a bone. She tossed the stone to me. I wasn’t the best catch in the world (Annie used to call me Butterfingers when we played softball together), but I snatched the stone out of the air as if I were Roger Maris catching a fly ball. As if I had known it was coming. As if it belonged to me.

“See if that don’t give you enough power to hold the door open,” she said. “See if it don’t open up a whole passel of doors for you. Some of those,” she added with a wicked grin, “you just might want closed again.”

B
efore I left, Lura gave me a flannel cloth to wrap around the Aelvestone. “Don’t touch it any more than you have to,” she warned. “It gives great strength, but at a price.” It was exactly what Liz had told me.

I looked closely at Lura as she stood beside my car in the late afternoon sunlight. She was staring at my right rear tire, stuck in a pothole. Her hair, which had seemed momentarily golden inside the house, was dull gray again, her face even more ancient-looking than when I’d first seen her. The Aelvestone had given her youth—and something else.

“That’s how you were able to carry me out of the river,” I said. “You used the Aelvestone to give yourself strength.”

In answer, she bent down and hooked a tiny hand around my rear bumper. She lifted the entire chassis to the left to clear the pothole. She let it down—a little less gently than was likely to be good for my suspension system—and straightened up, arching her back until it cracked.

“Ah,” she said, “I haven’t used Aelvesgold in more than twenty years. I’d forgotten how it felt … It’s probably added
a few months onto my life, but I’ll pay for it. Remember that. Only use as much as you have to.”

I told her I would and promised that I’d do my best to stop the Grove from closing the door. I started to thank her for saving my life, but she spat on the ground and waved me away. Maybe half-undines didn’t like to be thanked any more than brownies did.

I drove back home slowly, concentrating on the curving backcountry roads in the gathering dusk. I probably shouldn’t have driven so soon after the blow to my head, but I didn’t have much choice. I certainly was not going to stay in Lura’s house—not that she’d asked me.

The sight of my own freshly painted, squared, and trim house—even with its missing roof tiles and twisted gutter—made me sigh with relief. I’d bought it impetuously and had since had cause enough to regret the decision, but right now I was grateful that I had such a welcoming home.

When I opened the front door and knocked over a tin pot full of water, soaking the mail lying on the foyer floor, the relief evaporated. I’d forgotten about the leaks. I had to find someone to fix them before my house started to look like Lura’s. Just the thought of those peeling walls and crumbling ceilings made me feel cold and damp—which, as a matter of fact, I still was,
and
my dress smelled suspiciously of cat pee, which Ralph confirmed when he sniffed me. Wrinkling his nose, he disappeared into the hall closet (where he liked to sleep inside my shearling-lined winter boots).

Ugh!
I couldn’t blame him. I picked up the bucket and the wet mail and carried them both into the kitchen, sticking the bucket in the sink and spreading the damp mail out on the kitchen table to dry—bills and flyers, mostly, which I could deal with later. What I needed now was a hot bath and bed. I’d rest up tonight and then tomorrow I’d call Liz and tell her
that I’d found enough Aelvesgold to power the circle. Heck, I thought, unwrapping the stone from Lura’s piece of flannel as I climbed the back stairs, this stone could power a dozen spell circles. When I reached my bedroom I stood by the window and held the stone under my desk lamp, feeling a pleasurable tingle in my hand. Instantly, I felt less cold and tired. But Lura had warned me to use it as little as I could. Regretfully, I wrapped it back in the flannel (the same tartan plaid as the shirt she’d worn, I noticed) and slipped it into one of the little pigeonhole drawers in the built-in desk. I kept an assortment of objects in those drawers—shells and stones, a fairy stone my father had given me, a piece of broken willow pattern china that Liam had brought back from one of his rambles … I took out the china shard, recalling Liam’s habit of bringing little tokens—stones and bird’s nests, pinecones and dried flowers—home from his walks. The house had seemed full of his spirit when he’d lived here …

Now the house felt empty. By banishing Liam, I’d rid Honeysuckle House of the spirit of the incubus who’d haunted it for more than a century. In the years she’d lived and written here, Dahlia LaMotte had struck a sort of truce with the incubus, periodically allowing him back into the house. By studying her notebooks I’d figured out that she used her interaction with the incubus to fuel her writing. He was her muse. But after he had served her purpose, she would banish him back to the Borderlands.

I opened another drawer—the only one that had been locked when I moved in—and took out the iron key I’d found there. It matched the one that hung around my neck. At some point long ago, Dahlia had locked the key away. She had broken her tie with the incubus. But I still wore my key.

Why? I’d unlocked Liam’s manacles when I saw him in Faerie. He was no longer bound by me. I was glad he was no
longer in pain but as I took the chain off and put it in the drawer with Dahlia’s key, I felt the loss of that connection. The place on my breastbone where the key had lain now felt as empty as my house.

And how much emptier would my life be if the Grove was able to close the door and my friends chose to leave Fairwick?

Feeling rather desolate, I got up from my desk, checked the drawer where I’d put the Aelvestone just to make sure I remembered where it was, I told myself, then went into the bathroom to run a much-needed bath. I put in the plug and turned on the hot water tap all the way. I’d learned that there was just enough hot water in the boiler to fill up the massive claw-foot tub. The water would start to cool when the tub was about half full and then mix with the hot, attaining the perfect temperature by the time the tub was filled. I’d thought of buying a bigger water tank—Brock had said that the one I had was pretty old and eventually would need to be replaced—but it seemed like a needless expense now that the only one using the hot water was me.

While the bath filled, I peeled off my grimy and odiferous dress, dropped it into the sink, and ran water and added scented shampoo to get out the smell. I brushed my hair, working out the tangles—and a few twigs—and rubbed in a little jojoba oil to condition it. I added some to the bathwater as well. Seeing Lura’s wrinkled skin—even if she did look damned good for a hundred—had reminded me of the necessity of moisturizing.