A Witch's Handbook of Kisses and Curses (8 page)

“OK, why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what it is you’re trying to do. It will save us both some time and Tasering,” she said casually.

“Beg pardon?”

She sat in her chair, her expression wary. “I’ll tolerate a lot, lady, but I won’t put up with people who try to pull one over on me. It’s been done one too many times. Now, why are you so interested in Mr. Wainwright and his former shop? I can’t get much from you; all I see is rolling green hills and old pictures of Mr. Wainwright. And an old lady with an Irish accent in a purple bathrobe. And then I just get a bunch of static, which is really annoying, by the way. It’s like having nonstop radio feedback in my head.”

I stared at her. So that explained the mental poking. Some vampires had special talents beyond their strength and speed, such as mind-reading, finding lost objects, or just being very good at board games. She said she hadn’t seen much, but how could I know that? What should I tell her? I’d hoped to fly under the radar here in the Hollow, but having Jane’s input could help me track down the Elements. But could I trust her? These items were valuable, if for no other reason than that they were incredibly old. What if she started looking for them on her own and cut me out? Mr. Wainwright had trusted her, but I didn’t know her. And what was with the radio feedback noise? Was that because of Penny’s misfired binding spell?

“OK, whatever you’re thinking about, please stop,” she
said, wincing. “We just went from radio static to that ear-splitting tone the Emergency Broadcast System uses.”

During this internal rant, I’d forgotten about my mental Jell-O shield. I stared at her for a long moment, picturing the Jell-O solidifying around my head. The moment I felt it snap into place, Jane’s tense face relaxed.

“OK, that’s better. Whatever you did, just keep that in place, would you? You might as well tell me about whatever you’re looking for. I’d like to help.” Leaning her elbows on her desk, she asked, “Now, how do you know Mr. Wainwright?”

“He’s a distant relation.”

“I’ve met all of Mr. Wainwright’s relations,” Jane said stiffly. “He was the last living person in his family line. Now, try again.”

“He visited Ireland about fifty years ago. He didn’t know about his daughter, my mother. He wouldn’t have known about me.”

I felt another little mental nudge. Apparently, Jane was double-checking my story. I gave her an exasperated frown. She started when she realized I could feel it and returned a sheepish grin. “Force of habit.” She scanned a row of framed photos on a shelf behind her desk, before selecting one. “Mr. Wainwright was in Ireland researching a family of were-deer. Was your grandma named Bridget?”

I shook my head and explained that although he’d been seeking were-creatures, Mr. Wainwright had been just as happy to discover my grandmother, a hereditary
witch who healed the leg he’d shattered in a motorcycle accident near the family farm.

Mr. Wainwright saw enough to know that Nana Fee wasn’t just a particularly skilled nurse. While she cared for him, she explained about the McGavock family’s magical talent for healing and how we’d used it for generations. According to the journal, they talked about magical theory and books and films until the wee hours of the morning. And at some point, I’m assuming they did things that I’d rather not picture my grandmother doing, because nine months later, long after Mr. Wainwright had packed up and moved to seek a herd of were-deer rumored to be living near the shore, my mother was born.

I pulled Nana Fee’s photos from my purse and slid them across her desk. Jane’s eyes widened slightly, then she looked me over. She picked up one of the snugglier shots, her eyebrows raised. “Mr. Wainwright, you dog.”

“My mother was the result of their . . .”

“Let’s say ‘union,’ for both of our sakes,” Jane suggested, holding up her hands in a defensive pose.

“All right, then. Nana Fee never contacted him to let him know about the baby. They weren’t in love. She didn’t want to hold him back from whomever he might meet that he would love.”

“What about her?”

I shook my head. “Nana Fee never revealed her lover’s name until just before she died, not even when my great-grandfather and great-uncles pressed and threatened and outright begged. She moved into the empty herder’s
cottage on the edge of the farm proper and went about making a life for her new baby. No simple feat for an unmarried twenty-year-old. But Nana was gifted, and frankly, I think the villagers were too afraid of losing her services as a healer to shun her completely. Likewise, her family loved her too much to send her away. She never married. She had her daughter, and she was happy with her choice.”

Jane stared at me for a long while. “I want to believe you. The idea of Mr. Wainwright having a child and a grandchild makes me very happy. And I don’t think you have any bad intentions here. But you need to understand that we’ve been burned before by someone claiming a connection to Mr. Wainwright. Do you mind if I ask what brings you here now, after all these years?”

I gave an equal measure of considerate staring. “That’s a really long story, and I’d like to wait until your shop is cleared out.”

Nodding, Jane blew out a breath and sank back into her chair. “Well, hell, I wish Mr. Wainwright had stayed around now.”

I frowned. “I wish that he’d lived, too. I would have liked to meet him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” she muttered.

Never overestimate any supernatural creature’s sense of humor.

—A Guide to Traversing the Supernatural Realm

A
ndrea was staring at me. Hard.

I wouldn’t say that my new vampire friends “detained” me, but it was made quite clear that any attempts to leave would not be met with friendly handshakes and an exchange of e-mail addresses. With the customers cleared out, I was sitting at the coffee bar, trying to suss out exactly how much I should tell them. Since they’d kept me from dinner, Jane was nice enough to provide me with something called “lemon bars,” an odd cross between a biscuit and a custard pie. And Andrea was staring at me. It wasn’t an angry stare. She seemed to be looking for coded messages in my eyelashes. I started to blink in odd patterns while I chewed on lemon bars, just to see what happened.

Nothing, just more staring.

“Should we wait for Dick?” Jane asked, pulling the “Closed” sign over the front door of the shop.

Andrea gave me a quick, furtive look. “Um, Dick has a business meeting. I’m not able to reach him.”

“Why do the words ‘business meeting’ seem to be in unspoken subtext quotation marks?” I asked.

“My husband,” Andrea told me, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. “You’ll meet him later.”

“All right, then.”

Jane moved behind the bar as if she were going to make more coffee, until Andrea hopped over the counter with vampire speed and chased her away from the large, shiny cappuccino maker. Jane pouted a bit and plopped into the seat beside me. Andrea gave me a sweeping hand gesture and said, “Floor’s all yours.”

I straightened in my chair, clearing my throat. “ ‘Once upon a time’ is the best way to start, yes? Well, once upon a time, there was a happy little family in the wilds of Ireland, practicing what they called magic. For years and years, they kept the locals happy by caring for the sick, taking care of ailing livestock, and keeping the crops fertile. Even through the Inquisition and the witchcraft trials, the villagers kept peace with the family, because they needed them to prosper, and vice versa. You would think the lack of pitchfork-toting townsfolk would keep the family safe, but of course, in stories like these, there are always problems.

“It boiled down to a difference of opinion on magical policy. The family had always operated under the tenet of ‘do not harm.’ But a small branch of the family grew tired of being ‘servants’ to the locals. They argued
that the family should take a firmer stance, domination instead of appeasement. They seemed to think that we should be leading the people around us, instead of working with them—through force, if necessary.”

“Are you telling me that there’s a real Voldemort?” Jane asked, what little color she had leeching from her face. Andrea smacked Jane’s arm and rolled her eyes. Jane winced and cried. “What? It’s a legitimate question!”

I chuckled despite myself. “These rebellious family members said that the witch who can’t harm can’t heal, that there has to be a balance of both. And unfortunately, this philosophy led to a few . . . well, let’s call them magical amputations. This was unacceptable to the main contingent of McGavocks, and they asked these rogue relatives to leave.

“So that branch left the village and settled halfway across the country. Several of the witches married into the Kerrigans, a local family who raised their children according to a more strident magical philosophy. While the McGavocks flourished and enjoyed plentiful harvests and peace, the Kerrigan branch got more aggressive and bitter—although as a side note, they have made a considerable amount of money in the last century or so manufacturing small arms. Anyway, the Kerrigans went out looking for problems to ‘solve’ with their magic. Because, in their opinion, some people just needed smiting. And eventually, that included members of the McGavock family, which started a vicious cycle of retaliation and misinterpretation.”

“It’s like the magical Hatfields and McCoys,” Andrea marveled.

“You’re not entirely wrong,” I admitted. “We lost people on both sides, to violence and curses. About three hundred years ago, the two matriarchs of the families met and agreed that matters had gone far enough. They selected four objects representing each of the elements and blessed them with magic from both sides. These objects, which they called the Elements, were scattered to the winds, given to strangers, sold to tinkers, that sort of thing. The matriarchs agreed that the family that found all four objects first would be able to bind the other branch.”

“Like magical Pokémon?” Andrea asked.

“If I wasn’t under an enormous amount of stress, I would find that funny,” I assured her. “The potential of losing our magic was a considerable risk, a risk I can only imagine was inspired by desperation. It took decades, but we rounded up the Elements first and bound the Kerrigans from doing magical harm. For the most part, they’re no more powerful than the average disenfranchised teenager who has seen
The Craft
once too often. The most they’re able to pull off is a stirring of air, which, honestly, could be done with a strategically placed fan, so it’s not terribly impressive. But every one hundred years, on the night of the summer solstice, the binding has to be repeated by the family’s strongest witch. This leaves a small window of time in which the Kerrigans have the chance to obtain the objects and undo the binding, reversing it onto my family. They
tried it once in the early 1900s, and my nana Fee’s great-grandmother laid down a witchcraft bitch-slapping of epic proportions. I also hear there was a mighty non-magical slap involved. And now it’s my generation’s turn, and by some bizarre accident of birth, the so-called strongest witch in my family happens to be sitting here in front of you.”

A Cheshire cat’s smile split Jane’s face. Andrea held up her hand and said, “No!”

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!” Jane huffed.

“Whatever juvenile, ill-conceived test of her abilities you were about to demand could only end in tears.”

I stared at both of them. These were the people Mr. Wainwright had entrusted with his shop? They were the ones who were supposed to help me track down the Elements?

I was doomed.

“Sorry, Nola, you were saying?” Andrea asked, pouring me another cup of coffee.

“Under normal circumstances, the binding wouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “It’s just a minor incantation spoken over the artifacts. Around the time Mr. Wainwright visited all those years ago, Nana got rather worried about an increase in Kerrigan-related violence. She saw that he was trustworthy, that he was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. So she took the objects out of the family vault and entrusted them to his care. She thought they would be safer with him.”

Both women winced, the corners of their mouths
drawing back sharply. Jane said, “She probably should have rethought that. I don’t want to alarm you, but when I first got here, the shop looked like an episode of
Extreme Hoarders: Book Edition
.”

“I have a basic idea of what I’m looking for. There are some old sketches. Why Nana Fee didn’t think to take some pictures, I have no idea. But according to my family, she was incredibly secretive about the objects. She wouldn’t show them to anyone, for fear of the infamous McGavock loose lips. In other words, my aunt Margaret.”

“Quick question. Why the solstice?” Jane asked.

“Solstices are considered times of beginnings, endings, new cycles, so it made sense. And I guess no one wanted to travel to meet on the winter solstice.”

Nodding, Jane pushed up from her chair and paced a bit, straightening a picture frame here, shelving a book there. Andrea seemed to understand that her employer’s silence meant something, so, along with her, I waited patiently for the other vampire to speak. When she finally came to a stop, she said, “So, basically, you need to rifle through my stock and my records to determine if any of those objects are still in the store. And if they’re not, you need to use any information you find here to try to track down where they went?”